I am really new to Sketchup and OpenCutList. I am also fairly new to woodworking, and have made (and will likely continue to make) predominently hardwood basic furniture (coffee table, end table, maybe a bed frame some day, etc), and I haven’t been able to figure out how to generate a cut diagram with hardwood as the material. I can see how to do it with sheet goods and dimensional wood, but not hardwood. Is there a setting I’m missing or do I have to configure something in OpenCutList? Thanks in advance!
It should be basically the same as for dimensional lumber.
Personally I have never found cutting diagrams very useful when working with hardwood. Too often there are flaws to work around and I like to be selective about the grain of the wood. These are things an extension cannot account for. Hardwood is often random in width and that is difficult to account for.
I find printed full size patterns on paper better for working out where different parts will come out of the boards.
I agree entirely with @DaveR, for all sorts of natural lumber and furniture-grade sheet goods not just hardwood (vs plain sheet goods, where pattern and orientation usually don’t matter, or dimensional lumber, which usually only gets cut to length).
In most species, there are flaws you must work around in almost every board, and you must give attention to grain patterns and wood color to get a nice match between boards. Especially for glue-ups.
Also, I most often buy FAS grade (firsts and seconds) which come in random widths and lengths, which can result in a lot of narrow cutoffs that are waste.
I understand the concern for irregularity in hardwood dimensions…I suppose my follow on question would then be, if I call “hardwood” “dimensional” instead so the program will allow me to create a cut diagram, is there a way to make OCL recognize a particular piece(s) as a 2x6, 2x8, or 2x10 to account for the varying width I actually intend to use? For example, if I intend for a coffee table leg to actually be 1.5” thick x 3” wide, a dimensional 2x4 would work fine, but if I wanted the top to be several pieces of 1.5” thick x 5” wide, can I make OCL recognize the top pieces as 2x6s instead of 2x4? Hopefully that makes sense.
I’ll try that. Assuming OCL will recognize a particular piece and model the correct dimensional width (2x8 for example), then will it combine other pieces that the overall 2x8 would accommodate? In my rudimentary picture (not to scale), my table would have two 1.5 thick x 7 wide x 20 long boards and four 1.5 x 1.5 x 16 pieces for framing. Will OCL put them all on one 2x8, or will it model just the two wider boards on a 2x8 and the smaller ones on a separate 2x4? Thanks again for helping with this!
