www.popularwoodworking.com: Traditional approaches in woodworking are generally reliable and efficient. If you know something has worked well for other woodworkers for a few hundreds years, you can likely assume that adopting it will be a good way to accomplish what you want to do. But the traditional approach isn’t always the best method forever, and when a new technology comes along, it can make the shortcomings of a traditional approach blatantly apparent.
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I recently tried out using google sketchup as a free alternative to the more expensive CAD programs that are more popular. It was confusing at first but the tools are pretty intuitive and were easy to get used to. I knew about the dimensioning tool but I never thought about using it for making a cut list. That seems like a smart idea especially for those of us who are less inclined to handwrite because no one can read what were writing. I think ill get back in to google sketchup and mess around a bit more to see what I can find.
It is great that SketchUp allows for the making of cutlists. It takes most, if not all, of the guess work out of complicated woodworking projects such as cabinet and furniture making. Being able to generate a printed cut list to hand out can also eliminate the time trying to decipher TD scrawl (guilty). But really the best part is that the nature of the program lets you actually join the pieces together in virtual space and you can see how everything connects before you even cut your first board.
All tools have their strengths and weaknesses. I have found Sketch Up to be an incredibly useful visualization tool. It is a fast and simple way to see how parts will fit together in real space, and the modelling environment is quicker and easier to manipulate than AutoCAD, and the drawings are more realistic looking (without rendering). This all makes Sketch Up a great tool for me in the initial stages of a design when the ability to make changes on the fly and easily separate components of a design are the most important considerations. I have not, however, found SketchUp (the free version anyway) to be a very good layout tool. The author of this article noticeably does not post an image of the printout of his design, just a screen shot showing the modelling space. Unfortunately, without upgrading to SketchUp Pro (which I highly recommend if you intend to use this program frequently), there is no layout or paper space available. A well constructed model is great, but unless you can take that model out of the computer ("the files are inside...") and bring it to the shop in a highly detailed way, your model is useless. Often this requires multiple views, sections, scales, notes, dimensions and all the rest to get your point across fully, a process that would be painstaking if not impossible in the free SketchUp. The best you can do is export multiple different jpegs from the model space, which are essentially screen shots. These exports are not generally reliable in terms of scale, so if you forget a dimension a scale rule will not help you. They also do not render very well, so lines can be fuzzy and broken. The author of this article is clearly designing and laying out for himself, so his level of detail in the shop drawing can be fuzzy. But for us, layout is our language, and while a nice picture of the object we propose to bring into the world is great for visualizing, it cannot replace the detail and precision that can only come from careful layouts.
So basically I took from this article that it is great to fully plan out a design. Prior to grad school I used Sketchup to do the same thing. Sketchup or CAD is great, it lets you fully and very quickly flush out a design and also quite easily to alter the drawing. Doing anything by hand takes more time, but does not mean it should be dismissed. I do think Sketchup is a very useful tool and if you do not want to spend the money on a more dedicated program
I haven't used Sketchup to a great extent but I can see where it might be useful for someone not as well versed in AutoCAD and its 3D functions (if that's what you're after). In my experience with the Sketchup, Vectorworks and AutoCAD I have found that AutoCAD is by far the most accurate program as a drafting tool, in both 2 and 3D. Like Adam pointed out it seems that the author is trying say that you should have your project fully detailed and planned out before going to the shop, which I would think, kind of goes without saying in most circumstances. When it comes to choosing software there are certainly more than these 3, and SolidWorks certainly works great for visualization and is very compatible with CNC's.
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