Andrews Family

Along with all of my other hobbies, I also enjoy woodworking. And being a mechanical engineer, I enjoy designing my own plans. In college, I designed and built my own futon and I made Olivia a rocking bassinet stand. Unfortunately, most computer aided design (CAD) software for drawing up plans are really expensive and when I’m just looking to do a few woodworking projects that isn’t going to pass the local comptroller. Lucky for me Google has a free 3D modeling software in beta called SketchUp.

I thought it would be fun to give it a try and it just so happened that Jenny had volunteered me to make some portable hinged bookshelves with bulletin boards for a childrens education program at church. Wow was it easy to use. Granted I have some CAD experience, but it was very intuitive and I was able to draw up the plans for the bookshelves in about 30 minutes having never used the program before. That is unheard of. The only thing I had to look up how to do was to be able to type in the actual dimensions for the objects I was creating. I was even able to add colors, textures, and a woman to give you a sense of scale for how it will look. It isn’t targeted to the same market as most professional CAD programs for engineers like Pro-E, but for smaller jobs and visualizing things it really works well. There is also a commercial version with more features like being able to print to scale and export to CAD file formats for $500. Another cool thing about SketchUp is that you can import your 3D models into Google Earth.