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

[Moximo]

Jack_O'neill

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.

Probably as for so many others, the cost of AutoCAD and its learning curve, in terms of finance, time and diversion would not be justified by what I want to achieve with it. This is only an occasional task that would benefit from a bit of automation chiefly because of the time saved which the cost of AutoCAD would far outweigh. At the same time it would be good to be able to save the work for later use in a common format and perhaps use publicly available examples for guidance using a conventional method of working.

 

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.

designerstuart

good luck (and show us what you come up with!)

I started off this excersize using a copy of SoftCAD v1.16 from 1999 and found it so unintuitive that producing even one of the elements shown below was beyond me after many attempts. Sketchup allowed me to put up the following starting layout, correct to the nearest millimetre, in just 45 minutes.

[Glen1980]

Easy and quite fulfilling isn't it

 

A few tips I picked up from playing with sketchup the past few years.

 

For easy selection, double click a surface and it will select the face and all the lines that surround it. Triple click a surface and it will select the entire element, in the case of your screen shot triple click a face of one of your elements (are they battens?) and all six faces and lines will be selected.

 

Also learn the key commands to speed or ease things. From memory:

 

Space bar - Select

L - Draw a line

T - Tape, to measure or draw construction lines that won't become part of the element.

R - Draw a rectangle

C - Draw a circle

 

Also press and hold ctrl and or shift to select extra elements, deselect elements to toggle selections (I can't remember which does which but I don't remember the tutorials teaching me that). Also experiment with using the wheel mouse while pressing ctrl or shift to move in different ways.

[Jack_O'neill]

The more you do it, the faster you'll get at it as well. Save any standard components as thier own drawing too. Any brackets or anything that you re-use. With some planning on file names and such, you can build a library of standard components that are easy to find and reuse. You can even grab something close to what you want and stretch or otherwise modify it to save lots of time too.