I use 2 1/4" stiles that miter together to make cabinet doors. Is there a way to build a door and scale copies of it as needed? I don’t mind using a smaller extension, but I don’t want anything like Cabinet Vision or Cabinet Sense.
Have you looked at FredoScale from Sketchucation?
You could build a dynamic component. I did this for my generic windows that I use for schematic design.
FredoScale as noted might also work.
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I haven’t heard of it but I’m happy to look into it!
I will certainly try that! I think this might be the way. I’ll follow up later if I’m able to get it to work. Thanks!!
I tried following a YT tutorial but I can’t quite figure it out. The miters get blown apart and it doesnt scale correctly. I tried getting ChatGPT to help but it made it worse 
Assuming your frame stays consistent width each miter needs to be its own subcomponent with its position that changes when you change the size of the door. You can hide the edges of he miter where it touches the vertical and horizontal pieces. The miters need to have their scale locked. They just move positions as you change the size of the frame.
Each vertical and horitlzontal between the miters needs to be its own component. You can lock its scale to only length (assuming thickness and width stay the same).
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Assuming the rails and stiles are components, you can open one for edit, box select the end mitered edges, and move them to the length you need. No extensions needed.
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Look here for some ideas:
How are you using the door once you have it modeled? As Mike mentioned, you can use a Dynamic Component but you would need to split the rails and stiles into three sub-components, one for the center section and one for each mitered end. Then when changing the dimensions of the door, the center section can be scaled and one miter end just moved. Note that resizing a component in a DC is a scaling operation so scaling the miters in only one direction will necessarily change the miter angle.
If you need to be able to generate a cutlist from the model, the DC might not be the best because your door frame ends up being a minimum of 8 components or more likely 12 instead of just four. In order to get correct info out of the model for a cutlist you would need to do some other manipulation to compensate…
FredoScale, which was also mentioned, can scale the door without affecting the miters.
Personally I just use the Move tool for resizing doors. It’s not that difficult or time consuming and I like the control I have that way.
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I’m not that advanced in Sketchup. You can essentially scale with the move tool? I thought that was more for making copies and stamping. Would I be able to keep the miters, or even draw an ogee around the inside and scale it with the move tool?
Well, it’s not really scaling. You can select the entire mitered end of the stile or rail and move it to increase or decrease the length. This would also be the way to change the length of a rail with a tenon or stub tenon as well as stiles with mortises. That sourt of joinery would also require splitting the rails and stiles into 3 subcomponents if you were making a dynamic drawer component.
Move is for much more than that.
Yes. You can select the coped end of a rail and move it in the same way I described. Same would apply with a raised panel. It just takes selecting the geometry that needs to be moved and then moving it.
Although these aren’t doors, in each case one of these was made from the other with nothing but the Move tool.
For this, the stool was made from the bench.
Edmundson Bench
And in this case it was the Morris settle being made from a copy of the Morris chair.
Curved Arm Morris Settle
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I’ve used Stretch by Area for this task for years, but I keep thinking I should learn how FredoScale does it.
Box Stretching in the FredoScale tool set:
After starting to stretch the box, tap Tab and enter the final dimension.
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Whoa! You sold me on FredoScale. Haha I shouldn’t be so cheap and stubborn to pay $15 for a perpetual license but I try to avoid this because everything adds up. I get roped into paying for a lot of software outside of sketchup alone. But this seems worth it.
Thanks for the demo! I’m reluctant to try a lot of extensions and plug ins because some of them are difficult to use and don’t have a lot of information. I will only buy an extension at this point if it’s verified by some of you experts in the community.
I tried to make a quick screen recording of Stretch by Area, and is seems it does not work with Apple’s screen recording feature – very weird, I’ve never seen that. Just the plugin won’t get mouse clicks while screen recording is happening.
Can I ask what you use to get that nice wood look? I would like to make my cabinets look like Maple, Alder, Walnut, etc.
I make my own wood grain materials from photographs I take of full-length boards (6 to 14 feet long depending on what I can get). I typically make between 4 and 8 textures from boards from the same log. Here’s an example of fou walnut board.
These get cropped to single boards and imported as textures. I can then use parts of the textures like using parts of the boards in the shop.
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That’s weird indeed.
Actually, I’m not sure that was it – something more complicated. Anyway, at first blush, I don’t find Fredo Scale useful for this task.
- If you do this with native tools, you drill down to raw geometry, select the edges needed, and use the Move Tool (not the Scale tool), and specify the amount of the move – lets say, 4"
- If you use Fredo Scale, you’re presented with the Scale Tool paradigm with some scale factor which is useless to me – I want to type the move distance, 4". It’s not clear to me how to do that if at all.
- With Stretch by Area, it works just like you would with the Move Tool except it ignores nested geometry selects vertexes right on down through nested groups.
The last one also works just like the Move Points tool in Wild Tools in PowerCADD which I’ve used for years, so it’s natural for me.