This is side for a shelving unit that I designed last winter. I haven’t cut it yet, just haven’t had time. You would think that since I retired I would have time to do things. 
These aren’t identical the one on the right has dog bones. I have only found one dog bone generater for sketchup and I’m not really happy with it.
Everything looks good in Affinity.
Niiice! Would you mind posting your SketchUp model too? I’d love to see it.
Not much to it. I did have to turn it so blue axis was vertical, that’s not how I drew it.
side for fabber.skp (973.7 KB)
Dick,
Is the dogbone generator a part of sketchup or a separate download? Thanks for posting the file. It really helps to understand the process!!!
mikeacg,
It’s a separate download called milling tools. It’s the only one I could find. It worked great the first time I tried it which is the file I uploaded. I haven’t figured out how to control or change what it does and haven’t gotten anything to work since that first time. I would like to make the dogbones like the ones in Eric’s demo.
So those dogbones that are in my demo files are drawn by hand, reason being is this:
When you draw them by hand you get perfect arcs in SketchUp, while they may LOOK segmented, when they are exported by our plugin they come through as perfectly smooth arcs.
So if you did a dogbone with a .125 radius a .25" bit will fit in perfectly.
Some of the plugins that are out there for SketchUp break up curves in to segments. In some cases this could mean that a .125" radius curve technically won’t fit a .25" bit. You can certainly use these plugins, but take that into account. A simple workaround is just to make the dogbone a .130" radius, then if you get a few segments the bit will still “fit” into the corner.
I’m not sure specifically about milling tools and how it works (it’s been a while since I used it) but for those reasons I typically draw dogbones by hand.
You should try it however, I’d be interested to see what you experience is (and if it’s been updated to use arcs)
Having never used the Dogbone Gadget in Aspire, I’m wondering if it wouldn’t just be easier to just draw the parts in Sketch-up and import, letting Aspire do the dirty work. Run the Dogbone detect and let it create accurate files automatically instead of hand-drawing them in Sketch-Up and chancing translation issues. I seem to remember you doing that in a case study I read. It would certainly save time… I really need to play with that one of these days!
It really depends on what you’re doing… On some fo the furniture I make I’m particular about where the dog bones are and such, so I like to draw them in SketchUp. (this also lets me show clients what they will look like)
For other things that I care less about where they end up I’ll do them in Aspire.
Honestly it’s really whatever works best for you…