SketchUp: Proud Halflap Shelving System

Today's customer creations is sponsored by Bits and Bits. Use the code JBates to save 10% off your next router bit or cnc bit purchase at bitsbits.com. I am about to work out a design for a small shelving system for a bedroom. I want the utility aspect of these very basic shelves. I like the proportions of this one as far as the depth and width. I like this one but maybe just one more shelf. Four instead of, uh, four instead of, I'm sorry, five shelves instead of four. But I want it to look a little bit better than this. All these are, you know, utility shelves in a basement, in a garage, in a utility room. This is going to be in a bedroom so I want it to look a little bit better. So I want to pull some design elements from this particular project I made years ago. This is, I think the title of this is angled half-lap three-tier shelf. And I'm not going to do the angle on the front simply because I want maximum shelf space as I go up. I don't want to pull that design element. What I want to pull from here is the proud half-lap joinery. So this technically isn't a half-lap. It's more like a 7 16th lap. So it's, you get the strength of a half-lap joint but you have a lot more visual interest because everything is a little bit proud. So the end grain sticks out a little bit in all directions. And then this side face is on a different plane than this side face. If you were to flush up all of this and just make it all nice and flush, it just wouldn't be as visually interesting. So we're going to make everything nice and proud, but I'm also going to come back and chamfer everything. And it just, it does a lot for an otherwise basic, basic design here. So that's the goal with this project. We're going to jump into Sketchup. Start every Sketchup with a shift Z just to put the origin in the middle. Otherwise your, your view is all kinds of crazy. Actually, let's just go to file new and I'll show you what I'm talking about. If you start right here and you start to orbit around, look at how crazy that origin goes. It goes all over the place. Shift Z, then it stays right in the middle. I don't know why it doesn't start right in the middle from the beginning, but whatever. So we're going to draw on the red-green plane, which is basically the ground. R for rectangle. Let's draw a rectangle in this direction. The dimensions in the lower right-hand corner of the screen say that the first one is the longer of the two. I'm going to go 24 inch for my shelf width, comma, 14.5 for my shelf depth. 14 and a half because I have a 15 inch planer. Makes sense, right? So there's my rectangle. P for push-pull. And I want an overall height of 48 inches. Enter spacebar. Click and delete all of these faces. I don't want the faces. I want the wireframe. So spacebar, triple click. G for component. Enter. This gives me a wireframe that I typically do all of my building on the inside of. However, I'm just going to build around it in this case. So I will put my shelf on the inside. Let's go ahead and do that really, really quick. I'll do a shelf on the top. P for push-pull. And I'll pull it down one inch thick. I'm using 2x material, which is one and a half inches. But I think we can get away with the shelf being about one inch thick. Before I turn this into a component, I want a spacebar. Click this front face. M before move. Control brings up copy from this corner and that corner. So I can press divided by three. Enter. Ah, too many. Or too few. Divided by four. Enter. Let's see. Fourteen and a half divided by four. Should be three and five eighths. Yes, three and five eighths of an inch. That looks like a realistic panel size as I'm gluing this up. Spacebar, triple click. G for component. Enter. That is my shelf. I want to throw some color on it. So B for bucket. Paint bucket. And I'm going to drop yellow on here. Where's yellow? Yellow's at the top. Some type of yellowish, dirty-ish, brownish yellow. Yeah, mustard yellow right there. That's the shelf. Now for the side assemblies, I'm going to draw them on the outside of the wireframe. The most important thing here was the shelf space. The shelf. That's what's going to give me the amount of usable area. I'll build the frame on the outside. Off a rectangle from here in this direction. The dimensions in the lower right-hand corner say that the first one is the thickness. So I will go with 1.25 comma 2. Enter. Normally I have all this stuff worked out, but I haven't done that yet. So just kind of winging it off of a rough hand sketch. So let's go with all the way up for our height. P for push, pull. Pull it all the way up. Spacebar, triple click. G for component. Enter. This is my vertical piece of the side assemblies. And let's drop some color on that. There you go. We need a back leg. M for move, control, bring some copy. Whoa, I clicked the wrong thing. Right there. Two right there. Now we need some horizontal members. R for rectangle from here to right there. P for push, pull. Now these were two inches in width, the vertical pieces. I want these to be a little bit less than two inches in width. So let's go with 1.5. Enter. Does that look appropriate? Sizing wise? Yeah, we'll roll with it. Spacebar, triple click. G for component. Enter. B for bucket, paint bucket. We're going to add some color here. Let's go with blue. And now I will pause to cough. Excuse me. Now we can work out how many shelves we want. So first thing that I want to do is I want to grab this shelf. M for move from this midpoint. And I'm going to drop it down in the midpoint there. So it's in a midpoint orientation to this horizontal piece. Again, we have different elevation changes already starting to take shape. This is way more interesting than just making a solid rectangle, right? So with that selected, I'll spacebar, shift, select that as well. And it's four feet tall. I want an even divisible number as I go down. Simply because when I read a tape measure, I'm going to cut all these half lap joints on the table saw. Just reading solid numbers off a tape measure is much more convenient. Then let's say 12 and 3 64th. You know what I'm saying? So M for move control brings up copy. Let's copy this one in the blue direction. Let's go with 11. Enter. And I think I can do four of these. X for enter. Yeah, there we go. It gives me five shelves, four copies for five shelves. And then the bottom one is whatever that distance is off the ground. What is this distance? Oh, well, okay. So the horizontal rail is exactly four inches off the ground. And this should be a quarter inch lower. Yeah, three and three quarters of an inch. Sure, sounds good. So before I copy all this stuff over, a couple things I want to do. I'm done with this boundary box, this wireframe. So I can go ahead and click on it and delete it because it's going to get kind of confusing right here when I start to move stuff around. First thing I want to do when I start on my one eighth of an inch overhang is start with the vertical direction. All right, so let's click on these. I could simply pull this up by one eighth of an inch, but then I change my overall height. Rather than that, I'm going to grab these M4 movement, move them up by 0.125 inches. Enter. Still maintains 48 inches of overall height. I just stole it from the bottom, so I can put it up here at the top. Now, again, we're starting to see some more of these elevation changes. One, two, three as we go around. We need a couple more elevation changes on the front or plane changes. Let's grab this M4 move and let's move it this way, 0.125. Let's grab this. What we do to the front, we have to do to the back. Let's move it to the back, 0.125. Enter. And do we want to be able to see all of the horizontal piece or all of the vertical piece on the outside? So if I grab both of these M4 move and if I move it in this way, just a little bit, you can see all the horizontal pieces. If I move it the other direction, you can see all of the vertical pieces the whole way. You know what? I think for sure I have to, yeah, to make things a lot less complicated and also visually more appealing, I think it's more appropriate to see all of the vertical piece. But if I move this one eighth of an inch that way, 0.125 inches. Enter. Now we have an uninterrupted connection all the way from this blue piece to the shelf right here, this horizontal piece to the shelf. So that'll be a little bit easier to establish whatever joint that is. So I like that. Now we need to extend these horizontal pieces because they currently do not stick out of the front. So let's double click these blue pieces, P4 push pull. I'm going to push this to here, which should be one eighth of an inch. I want to go one eighth of an inch further than that. So 0.25. Enter. Spin around to the back side, grab this and go 0.25. Enter. Yeah, now we're starting to see some some depth here. And of course, these are all copies of components. So whatever I did to one, it does it to all of them as well. That looks good. All right, now let's let's knock out this joint really quick. So this is going to be essentially a half lap joint. Yes, it's not a 100% half of the thickness, but that's OK. Now, excuse me, I can't reference off of the midpoint here because this midpoint on the vertical piece is not in the same location as the midpoint in this horizontal piece. So what I need to do first is make a line holding shift. Oh, that's it's on the red, which is this is red. So you kind of can't see it, but holding shift. I'm going to constrain and go this direction and drop it off right there. So this line represents the material where these two pieces overlap. I can double click this to edit that part. And go over here to where they intersect. R for rectangle. Let's draw a rectangle on that face all the way up to this corner so I can P4 push pull and push this joint in to the halfway point of where these two pieces overlap. Nice and easy to do. I'm going to do the exact same thing over here. R for rectangle from this side or from that intersection over to here. P4 push pull. And as I'm as I have this selected, I'm going to reference it off of this space over here. I have a custom keyboard shortcut of Y to hide all of the other components in the model or everything else in the model as I'm editing a component. So you can see that I have both of these half lap joints cut on every one of these horizontal pieces. Spacebar click to get out. Now I need to do the same thing for the red pieces, the vertical pieces. So let's double click to edit this part. R for rectangle from this intersection. And I'm not going to drop off at this intersection. I'm gonna go all the way up. P4 push pull. And I'll push this all the way through. So now I click to get out and I no longer need this piece. I'll delete that reference line. You can see all of the depth that we have here. This is just a very, very basic half lap joint, but it's already way more interesting than just flushing everything up. This red face, this vertical face, is 1 1⁄8 of an inch proud of this face right here. And then this face right here is 1 1⁄8 of an inch proud of this, which is proud of this. It's a lot more visually interesting and I really, really like it. Let's go back to this vertical piece and finish our joinery here. R for rectangle from here to here. Now we can't simply copy that top geometry because it's open ended. But what we can do is grab this geometry. M for move. Control brings up copy. And there's kind of a rule in CAD work. Never draw what you can copy for the most part. I'll reference off of the bottom of that horizontal piece. Drop it off at the bottom of this horizontal piece. Press X3 to duplicate that two more times for a total of three times. Press Y and you can see that there are in the correct location. P for push-pull. And I'll double click to repeat my last push-pull command. And there we go. All of our joinery is done for the side components. I just need to do... I just need to figure out how we're going to do... How are we going to attach the shelves to the sides? So there's a couple different ways we could do this. And honestly, it all just depends on what you want to do. Dominoes is going to be the easiest. But then you have the extra cost of dominoes, obviously. Probably the least amount of expense would be... Let's hide this for just a second. I'll click on it. H for hide. I think that's a custom keyboard shortcut. Maybe if I do a stopped dado inside this. And then use a tongue on the end of this shelf. You know what? I'm going to model that just so we have the data and the information there. But I'm not going to rule out pressing the easy button just using dominoes. So let's start modeling that. Let's first make the tongue part. Let's double click to edit this part. And this is one inch of overall thickness. Let's do a half inch tongue. So let's say T for tape measure. Let's go up here by 0.25 inches. R for rectangle. From here all the way to this side over here. And then dimensions in the lower right hand corner of the screen say that the first one is my height. So without moving anything, I'm going to press 0.5. Enter. So this should be a perfectly centered, let's say, deep dimension. Quarter inch top. Quarter inch bottom. Leaving a half inch tongue there. Yay, I did something basic. Let's delete that. P for push pull. And let's pull this out by 0.5 inches. Enter. Just a half inch by half inch tongue. Double click to repeat my last command. And now I can grab 1, 2, 3, 4. Holding shift. M for move. Control brings up copy. Again, don't draw what you can copy. I'll press right on the keyboard, constrained to red. Drop it off on the back side over here. I can swing around. P for push pull. And I'll pull this out. I don't think I can simply double click or else it'll go in. Pull this out. 0.5. Enter. Double click. And double click. So now that's what the panel should look like if we... Oh, actually, no, it's not. It's not because this needs to be stopped. So let's double click edit this once again. And L for line. Grab this right there. Grab that face. M for move. Control brings up copy. Copy 1 into the back. And while we're at it, is that still selected? Yeah, that is selected. So let's spacebar. Click this. M for move. Control brings up copy from here over to here. And now I can P for push pull. Push this in. 0.5 inches. Enter. Because that has to be stopped so it's not shown on the front. I guess you could show it on the front if you want to. But I think that... See, why did you go that direction? Ah, because I was pushing it front to back. Okay, makes sense. Let's go this direction. 0.5. Enter. And go over here. 0.5. Enter. I guess you could have that tongue stick all the way through. But then it gets complicated as far as the overlap here. Yeah. So I guess it has to be stopped. Hmm, that's something to think about. Yeah, I'm going to stop that. Now if I press... There's a shortcut that I set up for x-ray mode. This is just a different style where you can see through it. I used I for x-ray. I for invisibility. I for x-ray. But you can see that that tongue does not interfere with the half flap, which is desirable that it does not interfere. Technically, I should get rid of these horizontal lines. But that's okay. I'll leave them there. So now we need to cut the female part of this tongue and groove joint. The stop dado. And for that, I'll get out of x-ray mode. And I will... Actually, you know what? I'll probably get back into it. Let's press ctrl-a to select everything. Hold shift to deselect this top shelf. Hold shift to deselect that. And then h for hide. So I'm only working with these two. Now I can press I for invisible so I can see through the components. Let's double click to edit this horizontal piece. My keyboard shortcut to hide everything else was active. So now we have these two pieces. I'm editing the blue piece, the horizontal piece. And what I want to do is draw the rectangle of that tongue on the blue face that I cannot see. But I can do that with the x-ray mode. P4 push-pull. And you can see me push away. This is that stop dado that we're creating. I'm just going to drop it off at the end of that. Now, if I was to make this in real life, I would make, yes, the tongue half inches, half of an inch in left to right width in this orientation. But I'd probably make that dado, that groove that I just cut, a smidgen deeper. So glue had a little bit of a place to go during assembly. I'll press I to turn off x-ray mode. M for move. Now move this out so we can see that, yes, that was created as intended. Control Z to put it back into place. U for unhide. And now it's essentially done. I'm not going to go through the hassle of putting all of the chamfers on here in the SketchUp model, although I will do that in person. I'm going to go back and chamfer everything just to give it all kinds of greater visual interest. Again, very basic project that should be very interesting to look at. I may go ahead and chamfer these as well. Yeah, we'll do that. But I need another side to this shelving system so I can use a window to select all of this. Remember, a window versus a crossing. If you select left to right, it's a solid box. But if you go right to left, it turns to a dashed box. So left to right is a window. Anything that is 100% inside this window, like just this top horizontal piece, will be selected. But if I go right to left, just that top piece is 100% in there. Everything else isn't. However, this is a crossing. So anything that crosses the dotted line or is inside the area will be selected, right? Make sense? So I'm going to use a window to only select all this stuff on the right. M for move. Control brings up copy. I will drag it over here to the right, pressing right on the keyboard to constrain to the red axes. Just drop it off. Now I will flip it along the red direction. And now I can M for move. Grab any one of these interior face pieces. Oh, no, no, no. I have to grab this blue. I'm going to grab this blue right here, this interior face, pressing right on the keyboard to constrain to the red axes. And I'll drop it off right there. So now, technically speaking, the model is done. I'm going to turn off this axis. But before I do, I'm going to change the scene or the style, rather. Change the style to construction documentation style. I think that makes the lines just a little bit more bold in certain situations. But it makes the background white. Now I'm going to turn the view to go to the view menu up here to turn the axes off. So that's not distracting and annoying. This should be a pretty good fundamental woodworking project. But how much material do I need? And what are the dimensions? So I'm not going to worry about creating an actual layout for this, for material, because I'm going to be cutting around a bunch of knots. I'm just going to get a pile of lumber and then start building. You know what I'm saying? When you're trying to avoid all knots, it's very difficult to determine how much material you need because every board is unique. But I do need my dimensions. So I'm going to copy a few things. Before I do that, before I copy, I'd like to make a couple scenes. The first scene that I want to make is what I call overview. I'm going to create this scene, rename it overview. Now, this scene is a somewhat isometric view that gives me a glance at the project's length, project's depth and the project's height all in one view. I always call this overview. I have another custom keyboard shortcut set up to update my scene as I make some changes. And that button is F3. So anytime I make a change, I can press F3 and update my scene. But this is the scene that I created. As you see that slow movement when I clicked on that. We're going to get rid of that in just a second. Now, the second thing I want to do is make a layout scene. So I'm going to go to camera, parallel projection and a top down view. Go to the right just a little bit because I always drag to the right. And here I'm going to create a new scene called layout. This is where I'm going to get my dimensions from. So the dimensions that are important are what I need to get one of these shelf panels. Actually, let me back up. I don't want to mess up the original. So let's grab all of this. M for move. Control brings up copy. Copy it over here. So I'm not going to mess up my overview. All I'm doing is basically getting the pieces that, excuse me, getting the pieces that I want. M for move. Let's move this over to here. I need one of these. Now it's easier to just rotate one or so of these into position. I'll rotate this 90 degrees. M for move. Move it around over here. And then make my copies. It doesn't make sense to rotate and move every single one of these. Put one of them in the orientation you want and copy however many you need. So with this one, I'll press Q for rotate. Pressing left to constrain to green. I'll rotate it this way 90 degrees. Rotate it this way 90 degrees as well. And move this into place like that. That's all I need from all of this. I will delete that. And I want to make sure that these are all on the same plane. So you can manually move them. I like this little extension called curic align. Align object. I'll click on this. And with all three of those selected, I can say move them all to the top face. And let's move it all to the left face, right? There we go. Now let's go back to my layout. Oh, which looks like I spelled it wrong. I imagine as I wrote that, some of you are just yelling at me. Layout without an M. There we go. Now as you saw, there's this really, really annoying. I think it's annoying anyway. This animation moving back and forth between your scenes. Really, really annoying. So what I like to do is go to window, model info. It's at the top, animation, and turn that off. Really, really annoying. Now I can just click back and forth. I know where they're at. Just get me there. You know what I'm saying? So I'm in my layout tab. I'll go over to here. Or layout scene, I should say. And let's start moving stuff around. Let's move this up just a little bit. Oh, no. M for move. I want to maintain that left side. And I need five of these. So it's not necessary here. But I'm going to go ahead and just move one over to here. Just like that. And press X for enter. There's my five. Now I need, I'm going to need 10 of these and four of these. So let's move this one over, actually. Let's grab this. M for move. Let's move this up. Which is the green direction in this orientation. Now M for move. Control, paste, and copy. I'll copy one of these down like that. X nine. Because there's 10 of them total. Five on each side. Grab this. M for move. Control brings up copy. Copy one down right there. X three. Because there's four legs. And that's my parts. Way, way easier to copy these than it was to rotate every single one of those pieces. So now we need some dimensions to go by. I'm going to give myself a little bit more space here. Now for the shelves, I'm going to give myself two dimensions. Because like I said, I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to use dominoes or this tongue and groove method. But I want to have both dimensions nonetheless. Give myself some options here. So 24 inches without the tongue. 25 with the tongue. Overall width of the panel is still the same. Overall width of these pieces. I will drop that right there. And it's crowded right there. So you can right click and say text position outside start or end. I'll press end. I started here. Ended here. So if I put outside start, it would be up here. Pretty cool, huh? Deeper dimension from this right there to zoom in a little bit right there. And again, it is crowded. So I'm going to drop it right there. Right click and say text position outside end. And these are symmetrical left and right. So one dimension for that is just fine. This dimension isn't needed at all. But there you go. And then this overall dimension is needed. So 15 inches. These are all just easy tape measure dimensions. I like projects like this. These pieces right here. The leg pieces. This is let's see. This is the top. Yeah, that's the bottom. So this half lap is going to be more unique or different than the rest of them. So let's just go ahead and draw this right here. Right click text position outside end. And all of these are the same except this one is one eighth of an inch longer, right? Text position outside start. That works just fine. D for dimension. I'm still there, right? Going from right here to here. 11 and one eighth of an inch. Remember, I made all my copies 11 inches. And that was my spacing when I copied everything. 11 inches for all the height, excuse me, all the shelves. But we did shift everything up to get that one eighth of an inch overhang. So everything should be one eighth of an inch proud. Next one should be 22 and one eighth and then 33 and one eighth and then 44 and one eighth. Easy peasy. I like that. I know that my spacing is different. I know that this one and these three are the same. What else do I need to know? I need to know the overall length of these pieces. So we'll put 48 inches right there. I need to know my overall width of these, which is two inches. I'm going to right click and say text position outside end. And I also need, ah, material thickness. That's right. I'm going to put a couple of different notes here. I'll drop this note right here and say, I'll capitalize shelves one inch thick. And I will do the same thing for. Oh, my mouse just went crazy. I'll do the same thing for this right here. I will say frame components. All of these are 1.25 inches thick. Um, I think that's it, right? That's all the dimension. That's all the information that I need. I'm going to update this layout scene. So it is right here. So I'll press F3 to update, but you can also right click and say update right there. So now I can bounce around between what it should look like when it's done. And the dimensions that I need to get this done. Um, of course, I don't want to put any notation about the thickness and length of this tongue, because that's just something that will be established as I'm being, as it's being built. That's it. So how do I, how do I get this information out of here? You can print it off. There is file print and printing in SketchUp to me is it's always been horrible. The text is always small and convoluted and just really, really, really annoying. So what I recommend doing is finding some way we all have smartphones, finding some way to synchronize your phone to your computer or something like that. I use an Android phone. So I use, I think it's Google messages for my text messaging. And you can use that particular text messaging program on a browser. So I take a screenshot of this and text it to myself right from my computer browser. How do you take a screenshot? Well, there's a couple of different ways to take a screenshot of your entire window here, your entire monitor. You can hold the Windows button and press print screen. I'm sure this is the exact same thing with a Mac computer. Or if you have Windows, you can press the Windows button and type in snip and enter for the snipping tool. And this will allow you to snip on your, your screen, anything. So I turn this into an image, right? This is now an image that I can save, email myself, open that up on my phone if I want to do that. Yeah, that's another way you can send it to yourself without downloading different apps or anything. Just email it to yourself. And now I can take this, I can print the image off. So the text is actually the same size as it's shown here. I don't know why the text scaling and SketchUp is so off for me. Maybe you have different results. But, but anyway, this is all the information that I need. And I can do the exact same thing to get a screenshot on this overview. If I wanted something to, to reference off of this, I can take another screenshot as well. Alternatively, once again, you can now go to export 2D graphics and that'll export whatever's shown in each one of these scenes. So anyway, there's the next project. Hopefully you found this information useful. If you did, you can go to my website, jscustomcreations.com and you can purchase any of my digital files. That's the best way you can show your support for what I do. Including this file, I'll have it available if you want to reference anything off of it. That's it. You guys take care, have a great day. And I'll talk to you in the next video.