How much CAD do I need to know to design wooden racking?

I'm building a framed wooden shelving complex out of 25mm softwood planed to 20x45mm and 9mm plywood sheet using various types of metal brackets and braces.

The basic design idea is to integrate adjacent racks, using common uprights and rails, cladding various planes of the structure where necessary to achieve utility, strength and stability.

Space is at a premium, so the design process has to waste as little space to such things as radiators, switchboxes and skirting boards as possible. It would be nice to automate cutlist production at the end of the process.

My questions are:

• How much of AutoCAD do I have to learn to get this done?
  
• Is AutoCAD the right tool for the job? Are there simpler - and cheaper - solutions, such as SoftCAD or TotalCAD?
  
• Does anyone know how to do this?
  
• Am I first person in the history of the world to ever try and do this with a 'puter?
  

I would be very grateful for any answers.

I'm building a framed wooden shelving complex out of 25mm softwood planed to 20x45mm and 9mm plywood sheet using various types of metal brackets and braces.

 

The basic design idea is to integrate adjacent racks, using common uprights and rails, cladding various planes of the structure where necessary to achieve utility, strength and stability.

 

Space is at a premium, so the design process has to waste as little space to such things as radiators, switchboxes and skirting boards as possible. It would be nice to automate cutlist production at the end of the process.

 

My questions are:

 

• How much of AutoCAD do I have to learn to get this done?
  
• Is AutoCAD the right tool for the job? Are there simpler - and cheaper - solutions, such as SoftCAD or TotalCAD?
  
• Does anyone know how to do this?
  
• Am I first person in the history of the world to ever try and do this with a 'puter?
  

I would be very grateful for any answers.

Well, lets talk about it for a minute. Firstly, knowing a CAD program and being a good designer are not the same thing. Those are two skill sets that just happen to compliment one another. You could know all there is to know about Autocad or any other program, and not be able to design an exit from a cardboard box, and the reverse is true. You can be a great designer and never work with anything but pencil and paper.

Autocad is a very capable, flexible, customizable program that has a very steep learning curve if you look at the whole package. I've been using it for 20 years and am still learning new ways to use it. Now, having said that, you can draw about anything with the line, circle, trim and erase commands. Yes, it is at once that complicated, and that simple.

Is it the right tool for the job? I would tend to say yes, but there are cheaper alternatives that are nearly as capable. There again, much depends on exactly what you want to do. Will you be using the electronic versions of the drawings to feed a CNC machine? Or are you just interested in getting lines on paper so your guys in the shop can go make the shelving units? If you have no need for 3d, then Autocad LT might be your answer. At a third the cost of Autocad, it retains much of it's big brother's functionality, but strictly in a 2D world.

There are many other packages from other producers that are quite capable in 2d and 3d, and some of them are even free. Automating data extraction from some of those can be a challenge but for others it's not so hard. There are several programming languages out there that can manipulate Autocad and some of the other programs to automate both the drawing process and to mine the drawings for data. For them to be successful, you'll have to establish some standard practices so that the data is always presented in the same manner, and a few other things too.

Are you the first to want to do this? Absolutely not. There are add on programs from third parties for Autocad and some of the other high end packages for making BOM's for anything from cabinets to entire houses or cars or whatever. Most of my drafting work is in the curtainwall business, and I have a couple of programs that will take my curtain wall drawing and extract the cutlengths for the material, then produces an optimized cut sheet for the person running the saw to get the most cuts out of his truckload of 20 ft lengths. There are similar programs for mechanical applications that will tell you even down to how many bolts you need to assemble your machine.

What these programs won't do however, is read your mind. If the data is not in the drawing, you can't mine it out. It takes some preparation to make it easy, but if you're going to do lots of these, and especially if each one is a custom one-off, it will pay off in the end. Even if you don't run with the automation thing, once you get a few things drawn, you can save them separately in libraries to be reused. The metal brackets and braces, details on how to put them together, all that sort of stuff can be drawn once and saved, then simply inserted in new drawings when needed.

Excellent presentation Jack.

Excellent presentation Jack.

Yes, indeed! Thanks a lot for that excellent introduction, which answers the main question for me. - and means going away to find out what my next question is going to be.

this is likely to attract some flak, but a very intuitive bit of software, which is free, is sketchup. if you are more 3D visual sort of person (and maybe a cheapskate) it's great. its one drawback i think for this kind of work is that it's difficult to determine lineweights, whereas in AutoCAD it's fairly straightforward.

but if you just want to draw accurate layouts and play around with shapes etc, with as little new software to learn as possible, i'd highly recommend it.

a very intuitive bit of software, which is free, is sketchup. if you are more 3D visual sort of person (and maybe a cheapskate) it's great

Well, I certainly got a clearer idea of what I could do in a far shorter time with Sketchup, but to get to the point of producing detail accuracy, cutlists, scene constraints or stability tests I think I would have to go up to Sketchup Pro8 which, at £330, is certainly not cheapskate country. However, I haven't seen all the Sketchup videos yet and what I've learnt so far is encouraging me to look further into it, so thanks for your suggestion.

In the meantime I'm looking at TurboCAD and DesignCAD as affordable, DXF/DWG compatible apps with a wide enough range of AutoCAD-like functionality and an accessible learning curve.

tbh i don't think the difference between skp and pro are worth it - in fact i don't see how pro will help you with the things you mention. but accuracy is good and easy to achieve, you can extract info from your drawing for cut lists, can you test stability in autoCAD? and i don't know what scene constraints are

it sounds like you know what you are looking for anyway - good luck (and show us what you come up with!)

Sketchup can be as accurate as you can draw and their may be ruby scripts out there that will produce cut lists.

With the free version when we have had to design furniture I drew each element of the cabinet as a component then built it on the screen as you would build it in real life. You can then arrange the parts elsewhere in the sketchup world and add dimensions to them.

Obviously the sheet builder (or whatever it is called in pro) would help you with the last bit. You could evaluate the sheet in demo full version which has an 8 hour time limit once you have drawn the racking in free (gets the learning curve out of the way without wasting your 8 hours) to see if it will benefit you later on.

Also I seem to remember that TurboCAD does have sketchup compatibility so may be you could work on it in 3d in sketchup then present it in TurboCAD. Hope this makes sense, I'm in a bit of a rambling distracted mood today, oh look a squirrel!

I drew each element of the cabinet as a component then built it on the screen as you would build it in real life. You can then arrange the parts elsewhere in the sketchup world and add dimensions to them

i second glen's comments - it's a good way to work

the sheet builder (or whatever it is called in pro)

it is called sketchup layout - and yes, i concede, that would be useful as it links to your model without the need to export images. but not completely necessary.

I would upload them but I put them on the network for safekeeping and some muppet deleted them. It was such a long time ago I doubt IT would still have the back up tapes.

There's nothing wrong with Sketchup. It's a good little program, and fairly easy to learn and use. It has its advantages and shortcomings like any other. In the pro version, you can attach attributes to drawing elements with things like cost and part numbers and what have you, then have SU export that to a spreadsheet to add up costs and quantitites and such. It also has multipage layouts and a lot of extra that you may or may not need immediately.

You mentioned the price above and thought that to not be "cheapskate country"...have you priced Autocad? The full version is 10x (nearly) the cost of Sketchup Pro. Turbocad, Bricscad, and some of the others are in the range of the SU price, some higher, some lower. Doublecad XT and Draftsight are free downloads. There are others as well, you can do an internet search and find them easily enough.

The free ones are free, and don't expire. The programs that you have to buy have in most cases more capability, and better documentation and support options than the free ones. That's not always the case, but holds true for most of them. And most of them have 30 day trial periods (SU Pro is the exception to that, with 8 hrs). I would suggest trying a few of them. The major commands are much the same from one to the other, so once you get one of them pretty well in hand, you'll be able to find your way through about any of them. They all have thier own personalities and little quirks, so you'll have to be adaptable when going from one to the other. The key is finding one that works the way you like to work. If you have to fight it every day and don't enjoy doing it, you're not going to have much success. On the other hand, if you enjoy using the program and its features, it can make fun out of work and you'll be productive and eager to do it again.

Oh to be coherent like Jack!

Yes, indeed! Thanks a lot for that excellent introduction, which answers the main question for me. - and means going away to find out what my next question is going to be.

Thanks! Glad I could help.

i think jack should get a little corner like michael's corner lol

and every day we can all sit down and listen to him wax lyrical on some worldly topic with possible tenuous AutoCAD links.

Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.

You think this is bad, you should read my blog page where I expound at length on the evils of full electric cars!

Thank you' date=' thank you, I'll be here all week.

 

You think this is bad, you should read my blog page where I expound at length on the [b']evils of full electric cars[/b]!

Don't get me started. Got a link to your blog? Sounds interesting.

Ok, here ya go: http://bryan-theviewfromthebottom.blogspot.com/

Don't say I didn't warn you. You get to guess though, as to which is my real name though, this one, or the one in the blog..

Now...back on topic...which program are we all going to use to draw the racks?

If it were me and this was a one time thing, I would just hire a CAD Draftsman.

If it were me and this was a one time thing, I would just hire a CAD Draftsman.

I bet I know where we could find one or two (cough cough) that do freelance work for a living

"The View from the Bottom is just one working guy's opinions on what's bugging him at the time"

hahaha