Door/Drawer Editor Feedback

[leigh mills]

Hi,
I have spoken to the programmers regarding a fix for the Door/Drawer Editor, they said if they get enough feedback, this issue will be looked at. So if anyone else is facing this issue or something similar can you post a feedback comment.

Issue:

The doors which we design are not supported within eCabinet Door/Drawer Editor, i.e. we have double panel doors, some of which can have the top panel cut out and some can have both cut out. We can have more than one tool on the inside, sometimes can be 3. We can have arcs top and bottom or Left and Right on an inside route, and we also have a 4mm radius on the corners. These are the things which are not possible within the Door/Drawer Editor. (I have attached some of our designs to give you an idea)

As these things weren’t possible within the Door/Drawer Editor, I was instructed to use a back panel, which is fine. But I still have a couple of problems with some doors, but that is another matter. So I have all the doors created as back panels, this is fine until using them in the room layout area, this is simply because it is so time consuming and not accurate enough.

At the moment I am either adding my doors/drawers and pulls to a cabinet and saving as an assembly before I even enter the room layout area, which is time consuming and this is not how eCabinet is designed to work. This is also a problem as when the room layout has been created and a customer wishes to view the cabinet with a different door design, as I can’t do a global change as its made from a back, so I will have to repeat the process of deleting the panels and then adding the doors/ drawers and pulls in the layout area.

This is so tedious and doing a job could easily take several hours or more. The way I see eCabinets to work is to create your walls, input the cabinets and then add the doors. Then you have the ability to do a global change, adding the doors in the door/drawer editor is brilliant as it is so accurate. Doing it my way even if I was to do it when in the room layout area, is just not good enough as none of the handles will be in line some of the doors will be out and so on.

I know that what I’m asking for is a lot, and many people may not be having this problem. We are not actually processing our doors from eCabinets at the moment as it doesn’t have the abilities for us to do so, so we actually use another program for this. So for this moment in time and people who have the same problems they should have some sort of “Display Only” button within the Door/Drawer Editor, then you should be able to copy the created door from which is a back panel, which is HSF into the doors file in eCabinet. (This would be ideal as a short term fix) We could then use all the abilities of the Door/Drawer Editor which would make design time a lot faster, it would also make everything more accurate and much more user friendly.

(At the moment you can’t copy into the Door/Drawer file as it asked for the settings, such as width and so on, and will start creating a new door or drawer)

So if anybody else is facing this problem, send a comment through feedback. Sorry it is very long winded but it is hard to explain.

Thanks,

Leigh Mills

[Neville Bastian]

Hi Leigh,
I agree with you that the door design part of the program door is lacking what the kitchen industry needs.
I realise that not many find this a issue due to the poor response your post had but I suggest anyone looking at purchasing a Thermwood to do doors with Ecabinets to get your sales rep to give you a hard sample with minutes taken to produce. I made the mistake of taking someone's statement as true without seeing hard facts.
If you took any main stream Vinyl wrap door producer catalogue of say 100 doors I say the door design program would be hard pressed to do 10%.
The problem with doors if you are doing them commercially you really need to do 100% of what the public require.
With the tools available in Ecabinets I wouldn't had thought the task would be as difficult as it seems. I am stunned how it handles puzzle joints, dovetails, blind dados and mould ling parts. I guess Thermwood just need the will to do this.

Please everyone hit the request to the programmers for this feature to have what you think is important to your kitchen design. It could multi panel glass panes,pocket cut doors, double patterns for pantry or robe doors. It also could be multi pass runs so you can get a quick involved profile with a fraction of the time to do modelling. Or could be square corners with the face groove.

You may be Ok now just doing carcass work but if work becomes harder to find you could keep the Thermwood from being idle by doing the mdf doors and painting them. You may even save money doing this?

Regards Neville

[Gary Urlacher]

I bought a Thermwood CS 45 machine. The biggest reason was the intergration with E cabinets. Although I am new to ecabinets,
I am using the batch process to produce my cabinets. I am still using cabinet vision for my quoting and presentations etc.

I was a bit mis led in the purchase of the router etc. I thought that doing dowel construction was very simple. As simple as
blind dato. I have to add each hole my self and constrain them etc. A bit of a pain. Also, I can't figuer out how to get it to
select my 8mm bit for boring the holes. It treats them like pockets and uses a 1/4" bit.

I was very taken by the fact that I can't bore holes in my drawers. I have seen other posts that say they have that on the list but when you
make cabinets every day and have to bore holes after machining, it can't come soon enough.

I was also under the impression that you can make MDF doors with ecabinets, If so, I can't figure that out. I end up using a program
i had from my last router to do this work. I know that I need to take some training in e cabinets but I have to say that until
I can custom machine drawers, I am less interested in spending time on ecabinets. Don't get me wrong, it is a very powerfull program
and is great but it seems odd to me that with all the power of ecabinets, a simple part editor for drawers would be a huge deal to most of us.

If there is even a beta version out with that, I want in on that.

There is one big thing that I must add to the wish list and that is a way to have a door list for outsourced doors. I out source my doors
and I still have to generate that on my own. There is a way (I think) to order doors via the e cabinets store but for me in Canada,
it is not cost effective.

I realize that ecabinets is a free program and I am sure it is paid for by the suppliers that support it. But I am using it becouse I bought a machine.
The machine supports KCDW. Is there a way it can be made to support Cabinet Vision without having to spend 30K on the CNC addon for Cabinet vision.

My two cents,


Gary Urlacher
Alberta Canada

[Damon Nabors]

Gary, Your door list is easy, click the buy list button and viola, You have your door sizes. As for the MDF doors, I have found that you can make them but you have to do a little thinking outside the box. I have made mdf mullion doors and all kinds of raised panel doors with just ECab software. I will not say it is the easiest but it can be done and after you have learned what to do, the next time is much easier.

Good Luck.

[Neville Bastian]

Damon,
I think I might have to do more than think outside the box it might be more like outside the room.
How about sending me a few jpegs of the doors you have done. Have you worked out how to do a pocket door with a V groove to look like a tongue and groove door?
We have a square design door with a square corner which is done with a V cutter made to travel from cut depth up on a 45 angle. I can't see a solution to that?

I'm trying to cut a door in less than 5 minutes without having to use profile modeler.

Regards

Neville

[Damon Nabors]

Here is a mullion door that I have cut several times Neville, This one was probably the trickiest one I have done todate. After cutting away so much material the hold down is not good. Block it in with some scrap to hold it in place.

[leigh mills]

Hi Damon,

Very impressed with the doors! How did you go about creating them, as you only have the ability to have one centre route tool.

If you take a look at my diagrams at the start of the post and look at doors F and G, do you think it is possible to do such doors?

How does it deal with a resize?

This is to me the most important thing that eCabinet needs improving on...

Thanks,

Leigh

[Damon Nabors]

I don't see a problem making any of them. As far as resizing them, I would have to play around with that and see. As far as a square door it is no problem.

[Todd Miller]

We plan to increase functionality with Doors and Drawer Fronts in eCabinet Systems. Unfortunately we can not give a time line on when these enhancements will be set for release. We greatly appreciate your input and deeply regret that the current version does not offer direct functionality for some of your needs. We will insure that these additional features get listed to be included with the future work for this area.

[Jason Susnjara]

I bought a Thermwood CS 45 machine. The biggest reason was the intergration with E cabinets. Although I am new to ecabinets,
I am using the batch process to produce my cabinets. I am still using cabinet vision for my quoting and presentations etc.

I was a bit mis led in the purchase of the router etc. I thought that doing dowel construction was very simple. As simple as
blind dato. I have to add each hole my self and constrain them etc. A bit of a pain. Also, I can't figuer out how to get it to
select my 8mm bit for boring the holes. It treats them like pockets and uses a 1/4" bit.

I have created a hole pattern that originally was a KD Fastener. It utilizes only the 8mm holes that can be drilled vertically. Horizontal holes are difficult because of the space between the nested parts. For boring the holes, you will need to have an 8mm bit added to your tooling library in Control Nesting. If you do not have this you can use a 1/4 bit to circle interpolate the 8mm hole. I will attach the hole pattern for you to use and you can test it out. I know that a few users have used this method of creating their vertical holes.

I was very taken by the fact that I can't bore holes in my drawers. I have seen other posts that say they have that on the list but when you
make cabinets every day and have to bore holes after machining, it can't come soon enough.

I was also under the impression that you can make MDF doors with ecabinets, If so, I can't figure that out. I end up using a program
i had from my last router to do this work. I know that I need to take some training in e cabinets but I have to say that until
I can custom machine drawers, I am less interested in spending time on ecabinets. Don't get me wrong, it is a very powerfull program
and is great but it seems odd to me that with all the power of ecabinets, a simple part editor for drawers would be a huge deal to most of us.

If there is even a beta version out with that, I want in on that.

There is one big thing that I must add to the wish list and that is a way to have a door list for outsourced doors. I out source my doors
and I still have to generate that on my own. There is a way (I think) to order doors via the e cabinets store but for me in Canada,
it is not cost effective.

If you are wanting to purchase doors/drawers through the software from companies in Canada, then those suppliers need to talk to our eCommerce division to get them added to the program.

I realize that ecabinets is a free program and I am sure it is paid for by the suppliers that support it. But I am using it becouse I bought a machine.
The machine supports KCDW. Is there a way it can be made to support Cabinet Vision without having to spend 30K on the CNC addon for Cabinet vision.

We have the Job Level Interface working with KCDW. We are really close to getting this done for Planit. You will still need to pay for either CV or Cabnetware and the Job Level Interface but this will allow you take Planit files from other users and machine their parts.

My two cents,


Gary Urlacher
Alberta Canada

[Gary Urlacher]

Thanks for the notes Jason and also the file. I only require the router to do the vertical holes like you say. I have a CNC
boring/dowel inserter for the other holes.

I do not quite understand how to use the file you sent. Can you give me a few pointers to get me going with it?

As for the doors and drawer fronts, i just want a report that can be used to order the doors.

I came across the information on a spread sheet that I can cut and paste into a sheet to use.
If the data was available, purhaps I could write a custom report in Crystal or something??

KCDW is sending me a demo disk but I do not really see the point since e cabinets does do a good job of producing
parts. I can write a routine to get the information from Cabinet Vision to the batch part of e cabinets. I have done this
with Router Cad/Enroute and I noticed the ability to do this in ecabinets as well. As soon as I have some time, I will
get that working.

Thanks again,


Gary Urlacher

[Jason Susnjara]

Hi Gary,

The file that I attached is a form of the KD Fastener construction. When you select construction you will choose KD. Then you will need to associate the new pattern to a piece of hardware. Once this is done, you can change the distance between each pattern and the distance from each edge to the first hole. Here are some pictures. Let me know if this makes sense. At some point we do plan on putting crystal reports into the software for customizing areas that use this but cannot tell you when as I don't know.

[leigh mills]

Gray,

Paste some of the names of the doors that you use. What I have done is exported the cut list to excel and got my reports that way.

Do you just use names for your doors or codes and names? Also how many doors do you have?

One other thing, are you machining the doors?

And let me know what sort of info you want to retrieve from the reports for the doors.

I should be able to give you a brief example of something that you can do.

Thanks,

Leigh Mills

[BenRatt]

I too would like some improvements to MDF Door machining:
1. The ability for at least 3 toolpaths instead of 2.The traditional MDF door would have one tool for the panel raise, one for the panel bead and one for the outside profile. Right now to machine these doors we have to run the outside profile by hand, or program them as a DXF.

2. The outside tool offset is backwards and I was told it's on the list to get fixed but not yet. A positive offset in ecabs will produce a negative offset when the part is machined. It looks wrong in ecabs and profile modeler but it machines correctly-crazy, I know. The big inconvenience in this is you have to program your cabinets twice if you are showing a presentation to a customer. They have to look right to the customer but then you have to go back and program them with the opposite offset to get them to machine correctly.

[Neville Bastian]

Hi Ben,
We are very disappointed with the Door Drawer program in Ecabinets. We have experimented with laying three patterns over the top of each other to get the door design we require. This involves halting the program before it does its final cut in nesting so is pretty stressful. The good thing is that it seems to nest the same way each time.
Really I think it needs 3 outside router paths and unlimited inside paths.
The internal corners can not be squared unless you use the painfully slow modeller and have a half a day or more to do a kitchen set of doors.
The other door it cannot do is the design copy of the framed door with match lining panelling. Not sure what you guys call it in the states but it is a frame with a 8 mm pocket then a V groove approx 75 to 100mm apart in that pocket. The number of grooves increase or decrease according to the width of the door.
The other issue is cutting the drawer fronts. Is the pattern on the drawer fronts the same as the door? Is the drawer made like a solid timber drawer set where you have rails at each drawer section. These are then cut into two, three or four? The drawer could also be like a door that is cut into the number of fronts required. Then is there a flip operation for drilling the metal sided drawer front bracket?
There is a lot to it so maybe the reason its been put on the to do list one day.
Todd Miller is saying it is going to happen, so that is encouraging. Hopefully they will ask a few Ecabinet users who do a lot of their kitchens with mdf doors to stand up and be willing to be part of a think tank and beta program.
Keep up the pressure you MDF door guys. Not everyone uses timber doors in the world market.
Regards

Neville