When Nick, a woodworker and LAP reader, first let us know about Layout Computer, his free digital chair design tool, I thought, “Wow – that’s nifty and would be awfully useful…if only I made chairs.”
Well, now I think it’s unbearably cool and altogether useful, because Nick has added casework (as well as a dovetail joints, and he’s working on a drawer-design function right now).
Bookmark Nick’s site. The tool is a quick way to mock up various casework configurations – and a lot more quickly than I was ever able to do it in SketchUp – using a series of sliding tabs to change ratios, board thicknesses. (Watch the short video on the “Casework” page and you’ll quickly be up to speed on how to use the tool.)
You can play with combinations of bases, vertical divisions, depths, number of shelves so on, and you can toggle between metric and American customary units.
And when you’re satisfied, click the “layout” tab to get the dimensions for your design. Then you can generate a URL (under the “save” tab) to quickly get back to your masterpiece.
And did I mention it’s free? Nick developed Layout Computer make it easy for him to mock up his own work, but he generously shares his work with the world (though if you’re so inclined donations are welcomed – just click on the “About” tab on the home page).
– Fitz
p.s. The “Joint” tab is also a lot of fun to play with…and confirms my long-held belief that 1:6 is the best dovetail angle 🙂
At some point in the 17th century (possibly earlier), some unknown woodworker (we’ll call him Woodrow Nerd) finished his lunch quickly and took a few minutes to look at his filister planes. Each was purpose-built to plane a rabbet to a specific width, based on the width of the iron as measured from the fence. He picked up an unfenced rabbet plane, held a scrap board against the bottom, and realized that if he could loosely attach the two pieces with screws, he would have a moving filister plane. Several lunch breaks later, Wood had a prototype, and all of the woodworkers who saw Nerd’s new plane wanted one. He didn’t get rich from his invention, but he rarely had to buy his own beers.
You stand on the shoulders of giants, Nick.
This is very cool and very generous.
I hesitate to poke holes in it, but the lack of portability/exportability makes me quite nervous. If Nick loses interest or develops a desire to monetise the platform (with no guarantee of a sane price) we will lose access to designs we might want to reuse or modify. That’s probably not a problem for a quick half hour design but I’m a draftsperson and have files that aren’t even that old I can no longer open that hold weeks of work, and so it’s now something I tend to be very wary of.
So for me this is great and potentially useful but I’d not count on being able to come back to a design in five years. I’d say that as this gathers more capabilities and invites more investment of time this should become a brighter warning light.
I have a nagging project I need to finish, and this looks like a great tool to help. I’ll be giving it a try.