Can I Sketch And Then Make Precise?

SketchUp
1

I’ve just begun learning.

I want to draw woodwork and metalwork constructions, joins mainly.

It is very easy to sketch up a piece of material - say a length of angle iron.

And then to make as many copies as I need.

And then to manipulate them on screen to make the shape I want.

My first example: a join meant to be welded between three pieces of metal.

That’s all good.

But the finished drawing is somewhat inaccurate because everything was just ‘sketched’, guesstimated.

Is it feasible then to try to work over the drawing and get things accurate? The exact dimensions of the work pieces, lengths of steel? The exact placing of one piece next to the other. Distances exact, angles exact?

Or is this the wrong way to go about using Sketchup?

An early attempt at it seemed to indicate it was going to be hard…

2

It is possible to draw your model without regard to the dimensions and then fix the dimensions later but it’s much easier and less time consuming to draw things with precision from the beginning. If you are going to model without worrying about the dimensions, it’ll most likely be easier to start from the beginning with the correct dimensions. It’s your time, though.

1 Like
3

You could upload the “finished” drawing here (7th icon above your post when typing), preferably as a SketchUp model. It would be easier to reply on what could be improved in your workflow to make modeling accurately much easier.

4

Thanks for that. So I’ll start again. :slight_smile:

5

StarPicketJoin.pdf (85.6 KB)

Okay. Hope that works. I’ve uploaded the .pdf I made.

The thing is a join between three steel pickets. Star pickets they’re sometimes called.

My hope is to get the dimensions exact to show exactly what welded connections we’d have joining them in this way.

i.e. what points of contact where a weld can be made.

So that’d be go back and start again on the picket and design it accurately in the beginning, I guess, according to the advice from the earlier post.

p.s. I see you said preferably upload as a sketchup model. How do I do that?

p.p.s. ah… I see an export as model. so I’ve exported and got a .dae file. I will try to attach it.

ah… new users only allowed one attachment per post… i’ll make another post…

6

Save your model to your harddrive and upload it like the pdf as you just did.

p.s. I’m using SU2014 on this PC so I won’t be able to open your file unless you have saved is as a SU2014 model (the option to "save as > SketchUp Version 2014 (*.skp) in the “save as” window) But someone else may chime in.

7

o.k. here she is:

Starpicket.dae (7.7 KB)

8

File>Save. Upload the resulting SKP file.

9

This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.