Sketchup Shop

[DanZ56]

Hello,
I just wanted to share my thoughts on using Sketchup. I tried Fusion 360 (they still have a personal use version, but limited to 10 active files). Once I was used to the interface (thanks youtube), I found it easy to use and it had some great built in features like animations and the material textures were good. The limit on the files meant that my assembly files became quite large, because all the parts had to be contained in one file.

Also, I found the drawing "workbenches" a bit fiddly to use and each drawing would be part of the 10 doc budget.

I was looking for an alternative and came across Sketchup. I tried the free version, then signed up for the 30 day trial for the Pro. I must say that I find all the extra features of the Pro worth the money, like the free add ons by the community, like the rounded corners, joints, more parts in the 3D wharehouse and the integration with Layout for drawings. As much as I would have liked to stay with Fusion 360, like Kev, I have limited money available and could not afford the cost of $60 US a month or $342 US per year for a hobby.

I have looked at several online cad programs, but they all want their monthly fee.

I have found that Sketchup is a very good package and well worth the money. For 274 Euros a year, it is a lot cheaper than its competitors and when you spread the cost over the year, it's about a fiver a week (about 2 cups of coffee) .

So, at the moment, I am busy designing new workbenches, drill presses and router tables for my new workshop, which I'm looking forward to building in the next few months. I have a small storage shed that is 2m x 2m and have to wait for fine weather to drag my saw table outside. In Ireland, I could be waitng some time. ☹
Cheers, Dan

 

[Kev]

Hello,
I just wanted to share my thoughts on using Sketchup. I tried Fusion 360 (they still have a personal use version, but limited to 10 active files). Once I was used to the interface (thanks youtube), I found it easy to use and it had some great built in features like animations and the material textures were good. The limit on the files meant that my assembly files became quite large, because all the parts had to be contained in one file.

Also, I found the drawing "workbenches" a bit fiddly to use and each drawing would be part of the 10 doc budget.

I was looking for an alternative and came across Sketchup. I tried the free version, then signed up for the 30 day trial for the Pro. I must say that I find all the extra features of the Pro worth the money, like the free add ons by the community, like the rounded corners, joints, more parts in the 3D wharehouse and the integration with Layout for drawings. As much as I would have liked to stay with Fusion 360, like Kev, I have limited money available and could not afford the cost of $60 US a month or $342 US per year for a hobby.

I have looked at several online cad programs, but they all want their monthly fee.

I have found that Sketchup is a very good package and well worth the money. For 274 Euros a year, it is a lot cheaper than its competitors and when you spread the cost over the year, it's about a fiver a week (about 2 cups of coffee) .

So, at the moment, I am busy designing new workbenches, drill presses and router tables for my new workshop, which I'm looking forward to building in the next few months. I have a small storage shed that is 2m x 2m and have to wait for fine weather to drag my saw table outside. In Ireland, I could be waitng some time. ☹
Cheers, Dan

Thanks Dan that's useful. You are right of course and think at some point will bite the bullet and buy the PRO version (although slightly more expensive for us from local resellers at about £275).

Kev

 

[Stuart Moffat]

Do any of you sketchup users use it for engineering purposes as opposed to woodwork? Specifically I am wondering whether it would handle say a gear box ?

 

[nickds1]

I think we should be careful when guessing why some application or other is becoming progressively more unreliable.

The filesystem in use on a Windows box maybe FAT (unlikely), FAT32 or NTFS. It's largely irrelevant which one is in use, though NTFS has better recovery than FAT32.

The filesystem is responsible solely for storing the data in the file on the storage medium; it had no say in or knowledge of the contents or internal structure of the file itself.

The structure of the file is controlled by the application, not windows or the filesystem in use. Some file structures are complex and can become unwieldy and even corrupt over time due to latent bugs in the application, e.g. buffer overflows.

Then we have the actual storage media. Spinning discs (the traditional hard drive) and solid-state discs (SSDs) behave in very very different ways under the hood. Specifically, their failure modes differ in cases of exceptional events and edge conditions, eg. power or media failures and timing issues.

In top of all that, you have caches, specifically write caches which may be on any or none of the operating system, the PC's disc controller and the physical disc itself. If a write cache is enabled but is not a write-through cache or is a "lazy writer" and is not battery-backed, then that is yet another potential source of issues.

And there's more (operating system upgrades etc), but this is getting boring...

So, it's perfectly possibly for a program to seem to become unreliable over time, but the underlying reason or reasons can be complex and could lie in several seemingly unconnected areas.

 

[J-G]

Do any of you sketchup users use it for engineering purposes as opposed to woodwork? Specifically I am wondering whether it would handle say a gear box ?

I use it to design Clocks - I guess that could be considered a 'Gear Box'