Shop drawings question...

[Terry Frazier]

Hello,

I am a relatively new user to e-cabs, and I was wondering how to generate detailed and dimensioned shop drawings once you have your job design finished. I am looking for a very simple wire frame layout displaying the dimensions, for both the floorplan and elevation views of the room, wall, and individual cabinets. It seems as though you have to go into the linedrawing editor to do this manually! I guess I am looking for someone here to reassure me that e-cabs wouldn't leave such a basic and necessary function of any cabinet software to be manually completed when it could be automated.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks - T

[Al Navas]

Terry,

Welcome to the forum!

I believe that you are correct - the eCabinet Systems Line Editor is where all the dimensioning is done, and it is done manually. You can select the entire Custom Layout, or any part of it that is available to take in the Line Drawing Editor.

You can select either dimensioning in either 2D or 3D mode. You can also rotate the item to your liking, but once you have entered one dimension on the page, you cannot continue to rotate the item you are dimensioning on that page.

The dimensioning actually goes quite fast, even if it seems like at first it could be quite a time-consuming task. Could you post an example of the Custom Layout you will be dimensioning?

I hope that someone else will correct me if I am wrong.


Al

[Glenn Warner]

You can get wireframe views of just about anything by selecting from the cabinet editor or the custom room layout and entering the line drawing editor. You can rotate, zoom, cut, and paste to get the view you want, then select the nodes that you want measurements for. You can have multiple pages and customize each page. There are no canned layouts but plenty of flexibility.

Not sure what you mean by \"manually\" vs \"automated\" because there are so many variations. While the Line Drawing Editor hasn't seen too many improvements, I have found it to be more than adequate and pretty easy to use.

Could you post some specifics on what you are trying to do and where the LDE falls short?

Regards

Glenn

[Terry Frazier]

You can get wireframe views of just about anything by selecting from the cabinet editor or the custom room layout and entering the line drawing editor. You can rotate, zoom, cut, and paste to get the view you want, then select the nodes that you want measurements for. You can have multiple pages and customize each page. There are no canned layouts but plenty of flexibility.

Not sure what you mean by "manually" vs "automated" because there are so many variations. While the Line Drawing Editor hasn't seen too many improvements, I have found it to be more than adequate and pretty easy to use.

Could you post some specifics on what you are trying to do and where the LDE falls short?

Regards

Glenn

I appreciate the quick responses and thanks for the warm welcome Al.

My experience with design software is limited so I don't know what industry standard really is by definition. However, it seems like any shop drawings I have seen include a room, wall and individual cabinet view with all given dimensions (i.e. wall dim, cabinet dim, CL, run dim with ext cab dim and int cab dim). Essentially, everything you need to hand off to your crew to commence production and leave nothing to the imagination.

I guess I am thinking this should be an automated process in which you choose a room, wall or cabinet by view (FP or Elev) and click a button to generate those detailed and dimensioned drawings. To alternatively have to go into the LDE from each of these views and define nodes to generate each and every one of those dimensions seems excessively tedious. In posting this question I was hoping beyond hope that someone could tell me that such a manual process as all that was unnecessary, and that e-cabs had the type of function that I am envisioning... I am getting the feeling that I am out of luck... hehe

sigh
cest la vie

Thanks again for the input - T

[Rick Palechuk]

The problem with auto dimensioning in the LDE is the drawings are 3D. They contain all the information about the item you have created. Therefor for the program to auto dimension, it wouldn't know where to stop. You would be bombarded with so many dimensions. Plus everyone uses dimensions differently, so there would be no pleasing one person. The way it is now, you can dimension for construction for in shop use and a separate drawing for installing or other trades. HTH
PS Welcome to the program

[Al Navas]

Rick,

GREAT way to put it!


Al

[Kerry Fullington]

Terry,
There has been a lot of talk in the past about adding an auto-dimensioning feature but I don't know if it is still being considered. Many of us that have been using the Line Drawing Editor don't want to lose any of its current functionality to have auto-dimensions. As it is now you can get as many or as few dimensions as you need. I personally think that auto dimensions will be added to the software at some time. Till then you will have to place them manually.
Tip: When you take a wall into the LDE, hide moldings, doors and other stuff that is in the way to place your dimensions. After you have all of the dimensions that you want then restore the items. this makes finding the correct node much easier.
Kerry

[Al Navas]

... Many of us that have been using the Line Drawing Editor don't want to lose any of its current functionality to have auto-dimensions. As it is now you can get as many or as few dimensions as you need...

Kerry,

I totally agree. Even though I have not been using the program very long, the flexibility of manual dimensioning is terrific. I don't think I would want to have every dimension on a drawing - ONLY the ones I need.

... Tip: When you take a wall into the LDE, hide moldings, doors and other stuff that is in the way to place your dimensions. After you have all of the dimensions that you want then restore the items. this makes finding the correct node much easier...

This is a great tip, Kerry. Thanks!


QUESTIONS ON DIMENSIONING, FOR KERRY AND OTHERS WITH LARGE SHOPS:

1. What size are your shop drawings, even for large jobs? Is letter size good enough? But would legal size be better? Is anyone using larger format printouts?

2. For large jobs, do you approach each wall as one unit, as the easiest / best way to do it? THEN you break the wall down into individual cabinets for dimensions, one per page?

3. Or is this something that is defined in a job specification, prior to signing on the dotted line?

I am trying to get a feeling for the best way to approach this whole thing, and would appreciate any feedback. Thanks!


Al

[Michael Yeargain]

Auto dimensioning could incorporate a radio button or or more depending on the depth of detail one would want. But so long as I can still manually place measurements



Next step...SCALED DRAWING ABUILITY.

[Joe Dusel]

I of course don't want to lose the manual dimensioning, but I would definitely like to have some auto-dimensioning for things like the cabinet widths, depths and heights. It would be nice to select a button to give automatically give the outside dimensions of cabinets with check boxes to allow you to select width, depth and height. I would also like to see it setup such that you only get the auto-dimensions for the cabinets that are selected. This way if you do a \"select-all\" you might just select width. You could then just select a few of a group of cabinets that are the same height or depth and auto-dimension the heights. You could then add any manual dimensions you like.

Joe

[Michael S Murray]

LDE definetly is the red headed step child of e-cabs, I for one would like to see it get some attention in the near future. For any shops doing any amount of commercial case work that require shops to be approved by the architects, Its a very slow tedious task, no matter how effecient you beleive you are at it. I beleive that if the line drawing editor were to be improved many more commercial shops might show interest in it and go to thermwood for many router sales. Just my opinion and take it for what it is worth. What a architect are looking for and what a homeowner are looking for are two different things..
Dont get me wrong, I am amazed at e-cabs and appreciate it, the guys are awsome, but the lde sucks for commercial work