Using SketchUp for wood-working joinery

SketchUp
1

Has anyone used SketchUp for designing wood-working joinery, such as a shadow box?

  1. Dove-tail corner joints
  2. Edge carve outs for glass insertion
  3. Slits for inserting shadow box back side
2

Sure. Fairly basic sort of stuff. A few woodworking type examples here: SketchUp Woodworking | Flickr

How will you use the model you create? That will determine the sort of detail you need and how you go about creating it.

3

Dave,

Thank you for the reply and some references.

I’m looking to build a shadow box for my Great-Great Grandfather’s Civil War Carbine.

I started using Power Point, with disappointing results; until my Guy at my Wood-Working Shop introduced me to SketchUp. I’ve been going through a lot of the lesson videos’ and feel this has some great promise, for this project, and many others I want to do. Much better than my old pencil, ruler and paper mode.

Here’s an idea, from the Power Point. Any other suggestions with SketchUp are invited.

image.jpeg
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Best of good health,

Joe

4

OK. That looks like a fun project.

Here I’ve started modeling the box. It’s really just a case (Get it? Case? :crazy_face: ) of modeling the boards and making components as you go. It would be good to start with the educational stuff at learn.sketchup.com and the SketchUp YouTube channel’s Square One videos to get the basics down.

Screenshot - 1_12_2023 , 2_02_53 PM
Screenshot - 1_12_2023 , 2_02_53 PM918Ă—619 159 KB

I imported your image into SketchUp to use as a reference but you wouldn’t have to do that.

1 Like
5

Dave,

Thank you very much. This is a great starting point!

I appreciate your interest and starting effort.

Best of good health,

Joe

1 Like
6

You’re welcome. And best to you.

Although it was not done with the free web version, I did a video demo showing how to model some basic joinery with just native tools. It’ll look a little different in SketchUp Free but the steps are really the same. You can see it here.