Cutlist Plus extension

Is cutlist plus a worth while addition to sketchup. Pros/cons ect…? On their site it says there is some sort of special link required?

I would recommend a plug-in called Cutlist, which is available for free from SketchUp’s Extension Warehouse. It works well, and will almost instantly produce a detailed cutlist that differentiates between boards, sheet goods, and hardware. It can also generate cutting diagrams for lumber and sheet goods. It’s also easy to use. And did I mention that it’s free?
Hope this helps.
Best,
dh

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I currently have cutlist, but it leaves a little to be desired as far as a
shop ready cut list is concerned. While I myself can discern my way through
it I would never hand this off to an employee. The sheet optimizer is
useless and the dimensions are not listed in the correct order, this
sometimes even seems random. No compensation for grain direction ect…
Just wondering what my other options might be

Joe Zeh’s Cutlist Bridge provides more power than the simple Cutlist extension, including some of what you mention and also ability to export to a separate sheet layout optimizer, Cutlist Plus fx. Some people find it too complicated, though, so you should try it and see whether it meets your needs and suits your workflow.

Thanks for the info. Yes as I look into this it does seem overly
complicated. The free cutlist is not bad it just needs a few tweaks in my
opinion. The largest thing that bothers me is that it doesnt list the
dimensions in the correct order. I really dont need or use the optimizer. I
see there is a way to export the info in cutlist to and outside format, in
doing this would I be able to set the order of dimensions differently? Im
new to cutlist so any and all info is appreciated. In the woodworking
industry the standard order is depth by width by height and in cutlist it
does height by width by depth, and on a couple of my cabinet backs it
reversed the order of the width and height between the two backs for no
apparent reason

I usually export the output as csv and then edit it in Excel to my taste. For example, I sort the boards by material, then by thickness, then by width, then by length as that is how I usually think about needed stock. It would also be possible to rearrange the columns though once they are sorted I don’t find that to be necessary.

Unless there is some metadata provided by the user, the extension has to decide on its own which directions in each board correspond to thickness, width, and length. It does so by assuming the smallest value is thickness, next is width, and largest is length. That isn’t always correct! If you use components for all your parts, you can point the red, green, and blue component axes to correspond to the right orientations but so far as I know Cutlist doesn’t use the axes.

Unfortunately, the maintainer of Cutlist passed away last year and nobody else has yet picked up maintenance of the extension.

I also export from CutList to CSV and manipulate the table in a spreadsheet program.

@slbaumgartner, time flies. It was April of 2014 that my friend Steve shuffled off this mortal coil.

Ouch! So it does!

Thanks to both of you for your help. Do you think that export as CSV would
work with a google spread sheet. I dont have Excel and im trying to avoid
paying microsoft for their programs. So far my google extensions have been
working out :slight_smile:

Yes. you can upload a CSV file to Google sheets and work on it there.

So I just tried it and it works awesome thank you guys

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Ok another cutlist question. Can I give multiple components the same name or do they all have to be unique? For instance , If I want to label all frame rails for a single face frame with the laben R18, can I do this?

If they are all instances of the same component, they will have the same name. All face frame rails that have the same dimensions could all be copies of the same component and thus all have the same name.

This leads to some important observations about best modeling in SketchUp for usage of CutList that make your question not quite as dumb as it might at first sound.

As its name suggests, CutList is geared toward planning the rough cutout of parts from stock. It is focused on the exterior dimensions (bounding box) because that is what you will need to saw out. It does not consider details such as joinery unless they affect the bounding box.

CutList distinguishes between parts based on two things: the name of the ComponentDefinition and the dimensions of the specific instance’s bounding box. That is, all parts that are unscaled instances of the same definition will get the same name and will be aggregated on the same line of the output (unless you select tables sorted by subassembly, in which case the parts within the same subassembly will go together on one line but different subassemblies will get separate lines).

However, if you scale instances (for example to create 6’ and 8’ 2x4’s from a single component) they will list on separate lines in the table because they no longer have the same exterior dimensions.

A “gotcha” here is that mirroring a part (one kind of scaling) does not cause the two instances to get separate lines because that operation does not change the exterior dimensions. A typical example is the legs of a table. They can usually be created by mirroring a single Component in appropriate directions, so CutList considers them to still be the same and puts them on a single line. However, if the legs are tapered, the orientation of the mortises in one front leg with respect to the taper is different for one side vs the other. This makes a big difference when you are doing the joinery (don’t ask me how I know that) but is irrelevant to CutList because both legs are still the same size and come from the same component.

So, if you need to hand off the list to someone who will not only rough cut the parts but also do followup joinery, etc., it may matter to you that CutList put them on the same line. In this case you might want to make identical but unique Components for the distinct legs so that you can give them distinct names that CutList will sort separately. This would normally be sloppy SketchUp practice, as it bloats file size, but here it is needed.

I note that using the Entity Info Window you can give each instance of a component its own distinct name in SketchUp, so that a part has two names: its component name and its instance name. For example “left front leg” can be the name of an instance of the component “front leg”. At this time, CutList ignores the instance names. So “right front leg” and “left front leg” will both go on the “front leg” line of the table.

Thanks for all of the great info. So say I have a cabinet which I give the
simple name “20” and the frame for that cabinet will be named 20. I will
have stiles of the same length but different widths and rails of different
lengths and widths. Is it possible to give all of my stiles the same name,
say ST20, and all of my rails the same name R20. This is for the sake of
simplicity when I send my cut list to the spreadsheet to be printed as this
is how all of the parts will actually be labeled, and all of my frames are
butt joined (doweled) and the size of the parts usually makes the
orientation obvious. Then in the lay out phase of the frame construction
the parts are given their order and orientation. In the same way the
cabinet case will usually have two “end partitions” that are identical but
opposite of each other and two or more “middle partitions” at various
intervals but all the same size, I would like to be able to give them the
same name for the sake of simplicity and the fact that this is how they
will actually be labeled. I understand making a part unique when it has
different dado placement or something like that, but I find that I have
many of the same part repeated in my case construction when dealing with
large cabinets or multiple cabinets within a run.

Remember, this is the component’s definition name we’re using. You can’t use the same name for different definitions. You could append something to make each definition name different. Let’s say ST20.1.5, ST20.2.0, and so on.

If you have multiple cabinets in the model, you could make each cabinet a component or group and then when you get ready to run CutList, tick the box to sort the parts by sub-assembly.

You discussion sounds like maybe you generate a CutList for a bunch of cabinets at once and your workflow consists of putting all the parts for cabinet “20” in one pile and all the parts for cabinet “30” in another pile, but that within a pile you have no problem visually telling them apart. So the labelling is really just for sorting the cut parts into the right piles (ok, you could have sub-piles for stiles vs rails, that doesn’t really change the idea). Did I get that right? In that case, if you start with a stile component named “ST20” and generate all the stile variations in cabinet “20” by placing and scaling instances, they will all have the name “ST20” on the CutList output though they will be on distinct lines based on as-scaled size.

However, I would advise against this strategy. It may work for you with trivial rectangular parts and dowel joinery, but it will create serious problems with anything more complicated. Scaling alters all aspects of the part proportionally, so when someday you get to parts with more complicated shapes the scaling won’t do what you want (e.g. tenons will stretch to a different size, notches and similar features will come out wrong, arcs will change curvature). You will have trained yourself to a naming convention and workflow that can’t grow or adapt! I would advise something like Dave suggested. It’s a minimal amount more work in SketchUp and will avoid those downstream issues.

As has been stated a couple of times: you can’t give different components the same name. The name is the key by which SketchUp organizes the collection of components in a model. If two different ones had the same name, SketchUp wouldn’t know which was which!

Thanks Dave and Steve. I have been doing something similar to what dave
suggests but was just trying to find a way to un-clutter the cut list a
little. And steve I would say that 95% of what i do is rectangles with butt
joints or dados. Cases are dadoed and the drawer boxes and frames are
butted. For unique furniture and curved work I would definitely want to be
very specific with the componenets.