daltxguy

Nice! This one has been in the back of my mind for some time. I imagine with a little thought and some more coding, the plugin could also do the push-pulling for you. I'll definitely have a look at this plugin!

Well, it's not summer everyone in the world. Here in the S. Hemisphere we are facing down the barrel of short days and cold nights. If you want more readers in the 'summer', you have only to appeal to those of us who are experiencing winter. Actually, my summer activity IS woodworking. Perhaps this is true for other people as well. In the winter, the lighting is bad and the shop is unheated so not much time is spent there and instead it's spent doing virtual woodworking online.

Steve/New Zealand

Not a suggestion for a particular kind of wood or a way of getting inexpensive materials ( though many good suggestions have been presented of which I've used many ) but rather when you do get a hold of some nice wood, it makes sense to make the most of it. A bit of free technology can be used to use your materials efficiently.

I've helped develop a free plugin for Sketchup which takes your model and produces a cutlist and a cutting diagram for your selected material sizes. This could be used to minimize waste and maybe squeeze another project out of your precious stock. It works equally well on the free version of Sketchup as the pro version. So, total investment is $0.

You can learn more about it here http://steveracz.com/joomla/content/view/45/1/ and more info and discussion at http://lumberjocks.com/jocks/daltxguy/blog/5143

Hi Dave,

I can't believe no one has automated this yet with a plugin. Shouldn't this be possible? Select the ends of the components to join, specify angle, number of pins, etc and have the plugin do the rest. That would seem easier to me.