I fought SketchUp for a long time. It’s not that I thought it was a bad idea, it is more that I was afraid it would consume my time. Building a model of your next project in SketchUp is almost like woodworking in that you get to create the joinery and assemble the parts. I get the same feel of excitement in the planning of the project as I do during the build. This is very dangerous.
I can’t tell you how many days on the river I have lost in the last 25 years tying flies and “getting ready” to go fly fishing. Tying a fly takes only a few minutes and it is enough fun to do that those few minutes can quickly turn into hours. Tried and true fly patterns are nice, but it is always sweet to add your own touch.
“What if I add a bit of Marabou along the body then rib it with copper wire to create motion and flash in the water?”
Before you know it, you have a fly box stuffed with great patterns that have never tasted a cold stream. You had a blast making them, learned a lot about creating flies, and probably a great bit of entomology too. You might say the time spent at the fly vise has made you a better fisherman…to a point. If you get on the river and you can’t execute that roll cast into the wind and drop that lovingly created fly exactly where you want it without the river dragging it unnaturally away from your target trout. If you can’t cast the fly you will never catch a fish.
So back to the wood shop. If you cannot saw a line then it doesn’t matter how beautiful that SketchUp model is or how much you have learned about the joinery. You will end up frustrated and cursing a blue streak as your project doesn’t look at all like the clean lines and piston fit joinery you created on the computer. So there is the bad part of SketchUp and the reason I have fought against including it in my design process for every build.
However…
For the hobby woodworker who perhaps sits at a desk all day and only gets a few hours in the woodshop each week, SketchUp can be a really great tool. Spending your lunch break doing some virtual woodworking can go a long way to giving you that fix we all need. Moreover the beginner still trying to understand which joint to use and when will gain a lot by piecing thing together this way. Maybe this is just the way I build but I usually start with a rectangle that has been push/pulled into a “board”. I then layout my joinery using the tape measure tool and “cut” it with a variety of other tools. This virtual process very closely resembles how I actually build in the wood shop and only serves to strengthen my own process. Whether using power tools or hand tools, layout is always such a key step to tight fitting joints. SketchUp really cements this process and helps you understand where to remove wood to get a good fit. This is all for basic joinery and is really helpful.
Now imagine you are creating something entirely new with a joinery method you haven’t used before. I’m designing a tool box for Semester 4 of my Hand Tool School that incorporates compound angle dovetails. Cutting these with hand tools is no different than a standard dovetail joint. Saw to the line, transfer to the mating board and repeat. The hard part is laying out the angles on the first board. Maybe I’m geometrically challenged but wrapping my head around this joint is making me cross eyed. 15 minutes in SketchUp and I know not only know how to lay out the joint, but why I do it that way and how to repeat it in the shop. This is a topic for another post.
This presents a very fine line to tread. SketchUp can solve many woodworking problems while working to create more if we don’t shut it down and get down to the shop. In many ways SketchUp is like a woodworking video game that can suck up many many hours of shop time. Of course all those years of playing Duck Hunt served me pretty well the first time I went to a shooting range.
I think you’re right. There’s a huge amount of similarity. I haven’t tied in years because I sold off a lot of my fly fishing gear about 8 years ago to finance a motorcycle build that I never completed (stupid, stupid, stupid…). But I can’t count how many hours I spent at the tying bench or building new fly rods that saw very little water. Just like favorite tools, I always seemed to come back to a favorite pair of rods and a favorite few fly patterns. All of those other rods and flys stayed stashed in my vest or closet until one day I let them go to someone who would put them to good use. Sadly, I made a huge mistake selling of my old favorite rods as well and now that I’m back into it again, I’m having to start from scratch. I could sell off a lot of my other fishing gear to finance the new fly rods and gear, but I’m not making that mistake again. The one thing I will say from all the time spent tying and building rods though was that just like your thoughts on Sketchup, tying and building rods gave me pleasure similar to being on the water even when I couldn’t be. Still, there’s nothing like actuallybeing out there, whether it’s on the stream or in the shop.
Didn’t know you were a fly fisherman Bob but I can’t say that I’m surprised. Seems quite a few of the galoot set also wet a line. I was on a rob building kick for a while and now have more rods than I could ever use. These days I prefer much smaller water so I mostly use a 7′ Bamboo rod that I restored.
You’ve made some great observations about SketchUp, Shannon. Some of them hit pretty close to home, hah! I’ve been guilty of making models for projects that will never be built in the real world. I travel occasionally for work, so SketchUp is a great way to stay connected to the hobby while I’m on the road, and it’s nice to be able to plan out the next project so the scarce shop time is more efficient. The flip side of that is that you have to know when to put down the mouse and back away from SketchUp.
SketchUp is a great tool for visualization and planning, but it’s easy to go overboard with the details. Unless I’m making a model that will be published, I tend to stop short of showing every bit of detail. I may be trying to judge the best overall dimensions for a project, or just trying to work out the details of some new complex joint or assembly. Once I have this worked out, I try to stop there – rather than putting every little roundover or molding detail into the model. Some things just work themselves out in the shop.
I’ve been using Sketchup for many years to help visualize projects, and each model I create has a different “level of detail” than the next one. I find that it’s really important to think about that before you start modeling, because it really is easy to get carried away.
I do a lot of cabinet layouts for schools and laboratories. Sometimes I’ll create a model that I want to share with a client, so I’ll make sure everything is dimensioned out properly, even if it’s not that important. I feel like if I’m going to be handing over a model to someone, it needs to be 100% accurate. That ends up eating a lot of my time, so I’ve recently started using screen sharing to review a model with a client remotely using http://join.me .
I wrote an article about how I do this using Sketchup at http://www.mastersketchup.com/sharing-your-model-remotely-live/ It’s a great way to share models because you have control over what you are showing them. It’s changed my whole workflow. I spend less time working on insignificant details.