Saturday, September 15, 2012
Cabinet Layout Method Reduces Errors
popularwoodworking.com: When working on cabinet or furniture project, most woodworkers, me included, rely on shop drawing and cutting list to guide our work. These are helpful tools but have their limitations. Drawings developed with a computer program like SketchUp can be very helpful and are well worth learning to produce. We have a great tutorial on it called SketchUp for Woodworkers.
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4 comments:
Alright, Popular Woodworking. I take back SOME of the nasty things I've said about you in the past. Your version of "All I Need to Know About Butt Hinges (I Won't Learn Here)" aside, the idea and practice of Story Sticks is...useful. For cabinet making, anyways. I'm not sure this has much efficient use for the scale we sometimes work in theatre (I'm thinking of some of the flats currently onstage...) but with anything smaller than eight feet - perhaps even ten feet - I can see the advantage of using such a shop device. No more relying on your pencil marks taken off a tape measure, which can compound error; now every piece is measured against the same length, over and over again. It also explains some of the tools in the shop having pencil lines all over fences ...impromptu story sticks...
I agree with Jake, this is an interesting and seemingly practical technique. I haven't encountered a layout process exactly like this but I now realize that there are some similarities to the way that I layout frames for simple and repetitive flats. I wonder if this is a technique that might also work for laying custom doors and similar items of a similar, simpleish design and dimension.
Looking at how they had drawn out the measurements and cleanly labeled everything with arrows reminds me of studio craft. Not only does some of the methods look the same but it goes to show that clear directions to make anything is always need.
Yes! I mean, no, it's maybe not all that applicable to our world. Scale being the main problem. Imagining a full scale story stick for a 12'w x 24'h theatrical flat is instructive. Maybe the best thing to take from this is to understand the inherent error in the way we measure things, and to account for that when we approach a build process. I worked with a guy who, instead of using a bevel gauge to determine angles, made a "bevel board" that had every 2 degrees marked off as he had taken them off his band saw. The world's definition of 34 degrees meant nothing to him: in his shop, 34 degrees was what the saw said it was. Squaring the world of the drafting to the world in the shop is always problematic, and for avoiding those issues, this method is practical and elegant. And if you like this you have to check this out: http://intheboatshed.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=83:lofting-basics&catid=43:general-boat-building-techniques&Itemid=68. Talk about your full scale drawings!
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