Shop drawings package sample

[Brad Moore]

Hi,
I'm looking for a sample package of quality shop drawings produced entirely in ecabinets that you would submit to an architect before beginning fabrication. I need to show my partners the "best" that ecabinets is capabile of before we decide to convert all our processes based on ecabinets. Our focus is commercial cabinets and architectural millwork. I would appreciate seeing what is the "best" we can expect from ecabinets.
Thank you.
Brad

[lesley paone]

Honestly the shop drawings from ecabs are nothing that you would want to see on a commercial level.

[Gary Puckett]

Lesley,

Would you mind showing us a image of a shop drawing ( for the commercial level ) lets just say of a simple cabinet.

Gary

[Kerry Fullington]

Brad,

HERE and HERE are a couple of examples of my simple line drawings. These of course are just for my use and for my customer, they are not for an architects revue. You can add as much detail as you want.

Kerry

[Michael S Murray]

Kerry,
Very nice as usual!
Gary and others, attached is a set of commercial shop drawings, This is just a small job, but it represents a typical set of shop drawings. This is what a architect expects to see.
These could not be done in e-cabs,(easily anyway) but I would like to clarify that I think E-cabs is GREAT for a lot of things. I personally know of several shops that use OTHER software that cost as much as a new mac Daddy truck,(or more) and when I see what it takes them to do something as simple as editing a cabinet side with a cutout or whatever, I am just flabbergasted. In some high profile programs, it cant even be done, they have to pull it out of the cabinet design software,into another software, alter it and return it to their origonal software, thats not even considering sending it to the machine and getting that set up. 95% of what I cut is drawn in e-cabs and sent straight to control nesting at the machine.Either as a individual item, part of a batch job or as a complete room drawing.

Hope this helps,


DAN, how are you doing??? Not much activity from you again............

[lesley paone]

I am not trying to start a flame war or discount anything that any of you do in ecabinets. Just on the line editing side of the software it lacks features and it is for all points useless. I am not saying I am good with CAD, because I am not. I actually am starting to try to learn it because ecabinets cannot do what I want. This is what commercial Cad files look like.
http://cadcabinets.com/cadcabinets/drawings.htm

Ecabinets is basically good for making a 3d rendering and exporting to a Thermwood CNC. Some of the major problems I have with it is no rounding capability in the line editor. Instead of getting spans line |------24"---| you get spans like |-----24.0001030---| I know you can change it to fractions, but no one wants to see 64ths either. There also needs to be a key that can be added to every page. Just a bottom area where you type the job name, designer, date, revision, company name, and things like that in.
I respect what you guys do, and I have lurked this forum for a couple years now, getting tips and learning ecabinets. but line drawing is not something it excels at. It is something I have been hoping would be fixed in v6. It is a great program, I use it every time I lay cabinets out to give the person a 3d view of what they are getting. Any ways, I linked to what I get as professional cabinet plans and I uploaded one too. The link is a guy I have been talking to and what really made me want to learn AUTOCAD. The upload is a job I was given to bid the installation of. I did not make any of these files, I just see files like these all the time and wish I could make them.

[Kerry Fullington]

Lesley,

I would have to agree with you. I can get what I need from the line drawing editor but it is a time consuming process and my needs are simple. I have never seen any line drawings done the way eCabinets goes about it. In one way it is good because you can get pretty much any measurement you might need but it takes way too much time and eats up too many resources. You can double the file size of a job just adding a couple of line drawings.
The only reason I can see that eCabinets would want to use the system they have is because they don't want to create any type of file that is native to Autocad that can be converted and used to cut from.

Kerry

[lesley paone]

See I don't own a CNC so that was never a thought of mine. Although it would seem like if it outputted to a pdf file that would be great. Most people have readers and they are easily printed files. I don't know if they are importable into cad programs or not, but I would think they lacked the file data to be of any use.

[Kerry Fullington]

Lesley,

I don't know if the export thing is the reason or not. The line drawing editor is a bit of a strange animal because everything sent to it is still a 3D entity. I think that in most other programs the line drawings are just 2D representation of floor plans and elevations which in the long run is all you need. There has been much talk over the years of providing some auto dimensioning features but those haven't come about yet.
Long story short, the Line drawing editor needs a big overhaul to be truly useful.
Once again, just my opinion.

Kerry

[Brad Moore]

Thank you for making the effort to discuss this item. It is important as our shop is going from doing everything manually to using CAD and CNC machinery. Our current manual method of making shop drawings is a bottleneck and a pain in the ***, aside from not looking very slick. Learning autocad is just too big a learning curve for the benefit given that we still need to convert the drawings into something that can be cut on a nesting machine or automatied panel saw. Can someone suggest another option for software that will produce shopquaity drawings and the nesting files without spending $30K+. I attached a sample of shop drawings from a $30K package that we would like to produce. Does anyone know if V6 might get close to this, or is shop drawings not such a focus?
Brad

[BenRatt]

Brad, we are a commercial shop and had this same issue. We have overcome it by outsourcing our shop drawings and then using those drawings to know what to program in ecabs. It's a much cheaper way than investing in 30K of software that takes years to learn. Although I know ACAD, outsourcing our shop drawings was the best thing I ever did. I'd be happy to share my contact with you if you'd like.

[Kerry Fullington]

Brad,

Those are excellent drawings. You can do most (or all) of those using eCabinets but it would be time consuming. (I of course don't know how long it takes in the other software. The big problem is that there is not a good way to get the drawing to scale using eCabinets. The dimensions would be correct but not to any particular scale.

Are you cutting using a Thermwood router?

Kerry

[Gary Puckett]

Is there a way of exporting your eCabinet drawing to lets say Delta Cad? ( This is a 2d cad program that does let you draw to scale ) Now that would be great.

Gary