voiceover:the woodwhisperer is sponsored by festool. faster, easier, smarter. and by powermatic, thegold standard since 1921. (jazzy music) aaron: hi, everybody.
woodworking bench plans sketchup, my name is aaron marshall. in this video i'm goingto show a little bit more about using sketchup which is a great 3d-modelingpiece of software
that you can get from google. it's actually sketchup.google.com i believe is the website to download the windows version and the mac version all for free. it's a great little piece of software. i use it a lot for creating plans before i'll go out into the shop actually. many of you probably know by now that
marc is working on a steamer trunk that is based on someplans he got from rockler. the plans as they came from rockler have a curved top on the top of the trunk. marc's actually going to change that a little bit and have a flat top. so i thought it was a good opportunity to sort of show a littlebit about sketchup. i'm going to model the new top,
not the whole trunk but just the top. at the end of the exercise we should have all the dimensions and all the littledetails that we would need to actually go out into the shop and make the thing. i'll ask marc actuallyto put that final file up on his website, but in the meantime takea look at this video
and it'll show youhopefully a little bit more about using sketchup. again, if you want to later you can just download the finished product. we'll make that available. the first thing we'll dois remove the old top. we don't need it and it's just getting in our way right now. i'll select it and hit the delete button
to get rid of it. then using the rectangle tool, i'm actually going to just trace the top of this trunk and create a rectangle that's the right size. in the spirit of gettingrid of your tape measure as marc puts it, we want to trace thingsand use the sketchup model as much as possible.
using the move tool i'llactually grab that rectangle, move it over here to the side where we can work on it without worrying about the rest of the trunk. this is the footprintfor the top of the trunk, the dimensions that we'll use. it will be two inches tall. i'll use the offset toolnow to select that face, and the offset tool draws a parallel line
around the inside, or actually the outside of a face or another shape. i'll bring it inside and just type in 3/4 because the outside of the trunk lid is going to be a 3/4 inchby 2 inch high frame. before i pull that all the way up though, what i'll do is get rid of that inside. hit delete so we havejust sort of a frame here. i'll go ahead and get ahead start on some joinery.
that front edge is goingto be a separate piece so i'll use the pencil toolto draw a couple lines, and separate it so nowif i use push-pull tool and pull up two inchesit's just that front rail. you can see that there'ssome extra lines left over. usually that would be a problem. in this case they'reactually kind of useful. the front of the trunkwill be joined to the sides with some rabbets.
i'll pull in a rabbet that's 1/2 inch using the push tool. then on the second end over here i can grab it so i've got it, and then actually justreference this other face so i know it's going to be brought in the same dimension. i know i'm spinning around quite a bit. sorry about that.
the last thing i'm going to do with that front lip is i'llselect everything there. i'm going to reverse the faces because i just like to kindof see everything white, my ocd coming out, and then i'll make it a component. i'll call it the lid front. always replace theselection with the component and hit create.
now we've got a separate component called the lid front that's got some of the right joinery, the rabbet. we'll add some more later. what i can do then is copy that. the move tool is actuallya great way to copy. you just pretend likeyou're going to move it, but then hold down the control key and it makes a copy.
i'll move it to the back here. again, using the move tool still i'll hover over one ofthese little plus signs, rotate it around 280 degrees. now that is the back or our trunk. i'll move it into position grabbing it at that bottom corner,moving it to right there on our template if you will. now we've got the frontand the back all set up.
now it will be fairly easy to work on the sides of the lid with a rectangle. just come in here and draw a rectangle from one edge to the other. push-pull tool, push it up to the same height, 2 inches. select tool again. i'mgoing to flip all the, reverse all the facesjust to get everything consistently colored.
that will help eventually if i do add textures, wood textures to the faces. that will help keep everything nice. i'll select that wholepart, right-click on it make it a component, and i'll call this a lid side, and create. now to create the second side, i'll just select thecomponent we just created, and using the move tool grab it,
hold down the controlkey to get a fresh copy. i'll put it over here. i actually do need to spin it because i am going to add somejoinery to it later. if i do that, the goodthing about components is if you edit one they all change, but i would hate for a rabbet to show up on the wrong side of a component so i'll show you that in a second.
now we have the roughed in top, frame of the top, and that's all we need. voiceover:this is just onepart of a three-part series on sketchup basics, but if you've neverused the program before, you might need a morein-depth introduction. for that i recommend going to sketchupforwoodworkers.com. rob will take you through the basics
of setting up a project from a woodworkers perspective. so i highly recommendchecking his site out. thanks for watching, everybody.