Dave's SketchUp Blather #7: The Table Tutorial Continued - Adding a Drawer and Edge Trim

Published Jan. 17, 2009 at 2:25 p.m.

Well, I showed the table to my client. It’s fine except she’d like a shallow drawer in it. Easy enough at this stage. After deciding on the depth of the drawer, we figure out we need to add 3” to the height of the aprons. We start with the legs, though.

We’ll hide the top for the time being and then we’ll open a leg component for editing and with the Select tool, we’ll drag a left to right selection box around the part of the leg that contains the bottom edges of the mortise and the fold lines at the ends of the tapers. Note that the direction the selection box is made is important. left to right selects only those entities which fall completely inside the selection box. Right to left selects everything that even partially falls in the box. You might find it easier to shift to Wireframe or X-ray view when doing this sort of selection. It’ll make it easier to see that you’ve selected what you need and nothing more. You might also find it useful to switch the camera to Parallel Projection and set the view to an orthographic view. This tends to be helpful when there’s a lot of depth in the selection area.

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Next, we’ll get the Move tool and move the selected entities down 3”. We don’t need to grab the selected entities to move them since they are preselected. It’s easier to click on an edge that is oriented in the direction we want to go. In this case, the outside edge of the leg works fine. Start the move in the proper direction, stop and type 3 followed by the Enter key. If the leg becomes distorted you either missed something in the selection or selected something you shouldn’t have or you didn’t move the selection vertically. Go back and check to see what happened.

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Now we’re finished editing all of the legs. If you are following along and made the legs groups instead, you need to go around and do the same editing to the other three. We’ll wait. ;)

Next well, get the Select tool and select all of the apron components. Get the Move tool and move them down 3”. Make sure you are moving parallel to the blue direction. Use a vertical edge to run the tool against.

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We’ll basically repeat what we did on the legs but this time we’ll do it on the upper half of the aprons. We could do it on the bottom and it would have eliminated the previous step. I chose to do it this way instead because of the extra geometry in the lower half of the apron. It’s easier to make a smaller slection box and there’s less risk of selecting entities that we don’t. So a left to right selection box around the upper part of the apron and move the selection up 3”.

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The X-ray view shows what was selected on the tenons.

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After the move we can see in the X-ray view that our joinery is still correct.

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Now we’ll select only the front Apron component, right click and choose Make Unique from the context menu. This breaks the relationship between this component and the others like it. Then we’ll lay out the opening for the drawer with a few guidelines. Open the component for editing, drag a rectangle and use Push/Pull to punch the opening.

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We’re going to do an inset drawer for this table. A lot of folks would draw the drawer front to its final dimensions and then try to insert it into the hole and get it centered. You and I are going to do it in an easier way and be sure of having it placed correctly. Make sure you deselect the apron so you aren’t editing it. Drag a rectangle across the opening. Push/Pull in to give it thickness. (5/8”, the same thickness as the apron.) Hide the front apron for a moment if you wish. Then use Push/Pull on the edges and push in 1/16”. Remember you push the first edge in and type 1/16 followed by the Enter key. After that, double click on the three remaining edges of the drawer front and you’re done adjusting the size. You can actually run Push/Pull on the edges without hiding the apron but you might find it easier to hide it if you are just getting started.

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Make the drawer front a component and unhide the apron.

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Well, we might as well unhide the top, too.

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Now we’d better hide the ugly edges of that top. First we’ll open it for editing. then with Push/Pull we’ll go around and cut 1” off each edge. In this case that is the amount of overhang from the legs so we can just push in to the legs.

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Next, we’ll get the Rectangle tool and draw a rectangle on one edge of the top. Push/Pull will pull it out to 1” wide.

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We’ll zoom in close and draw the profile for the edge of the trim. I just made this one up on the fly but we could carefully lay out guidelines and draw a profile based on router bits or a shaper cutter we intend to use.

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Push/Pull makes quick work of cutting away the waste.

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Get the Eraser tool and while holding the Ctrl key, run it over any horizontal lines you have to soften them after the Push/Pull operation. Make the edge trim a component.

Now, we’ll put trim on the other three sides. of the top. This is similar to the way we created the side apron components way back in the beginning but we’re going to add a new trick. (Sorry, no pictures of this one.)

Locate the center of the top with a couple of guidelines. You can use inferencing for this but the guidelines are quick and easy to do and assure you that you’ve got the center. Next select the edge trim component and get the Rotate tool. Hit Ctrl to invoke copy. Click on the intersection of the two guidelines to set the center of rotation. Then click either along one of the guidelines or at the midpoint of an edge of the trim component. Start dragging a copy of the trim around the top. Stop. Type 90, Enter, *3, Enter. This says, “Rotate the first copy 90° and make a total of three copies of the original each at a 90° angle from the previous one.” We should have this when we’re done.

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Next we need to miter the ends of the trim. We’re going to zoom in on the nearest corner and work there. We can do minimal orbiting around this way. Open on of the visible edge trim components for editing and use Push/Pull to add some length to the molding. The length we add isn’t critical as long as we add more than the width of the molding. Then open the neighboring component and add some length to that end, too. The trim now overlaps.

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Now, we’re going to create a cutting plane to use in mitering the trim. Deselect the components so you aren’t editing and layout some guidelines at the miter angle. Orbit down low so you can look up at the bottom of the molding and get the yellow Protractor tool. Click on the corner of the table top which corresponds to the inside corner where the molding intersect. Then click along the edge and drag the guideline around to 45°. Get the Tape Measure tool and drag a guideline down from the previous line. Make sure you are putting it below the line. The trailer should be blue while you are placing the guideline. Put one above the trim too. The distances aren’t critical for this but the cutting plane needs to be drawn so its edges don’t lie on the trim.

Get the Rectangle tool and draw a rectangle between these last two guidelines.

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Double click on the cutting plane to select all of it.

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Click on the Copy button on the toolbar or hit Ctrl+C. We normally use Ctrl+Move to copy stuff in SketchUp but this is one exception. Open one of the trim components for editing and then click on Edit>Paste in Place. The cutting plane is now pasted inside the component. It should still be selected. Get the Select tool and triple click on the trim to select all of it. Then right click and choose Intersect>With Selected. When the intersection is com,plete you should see a black edge around the trim component where the cutting plane passes through it.

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Erase the waste end of the trim as well as the cutting plane.

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Open the neighboring trim component for editing and repeat the above steps starting at Edit>Paste in Place. This puts the miter on the opposite end of the trim. Deslect the trim and double click on the original of the cutting plane. Hit the Delete key.

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How does that trim look? Is it kind of odd this way?

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Maybe it would look better the other way round. We can quickly show that. Select the trim components, right click and choose Flip along Blue.

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We’ll let the client decide.

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You’re probably wondering why there’s no drawer behind that drawer front. I don’t blame you. I haven’t drawn it yet because I don’t have approval from the client on the drawer. No point in doing the work if we don’t know this is right, yet.

Next time we’ll talk about adding the materials and we’ll see what the client has decided about the drawer.

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