Designing a Contractor Trailer in SketchUp - 359

hey folks how you doing hopefully you're all having a great day today a friend of mine is a local contractor and asked me to create version two of his rolling tool box right or his contractor trailer he's a he's a lifelong contractor always works on site and has always had a box trailer pulled behind his truck with his tools so there's a lot of design inspiration out there on the internet one that i want to point out specifically is ron polk the awesome rolling tool box is his design of a rolling trailer and i pointed out specifically because my friend got the idea to use these viewtainers which is this rack back here uh from ron so it's worth giving him credit that he's inspiring a lot of people to make some really awesome tooling setups for people on the go if you're interested ron paul does have a set of plans for his specific design in his specific trailer this is not for that specific size trailer it's quite different as a matter of fact let me hide everything and i'll show you the trailer itself it's this is the top down view this is a whoops there's the top down view this is a horse trailer and some of you might be thinking why in the world make a horse trailer into a rolling tool box and the answer to that is because he's got one and because he wants to so this is the design we're starting with this is the canvas this is the footprint up here is attack room in the front and there's a door to this side this is kind of a small space not really too there's not really much that can be greatly designed for it because he's going to be using it kind of like a break room he's going to put a plug-in cooler have a microwave and stuff to keep the people stuff to keep his people on the job rather than driving off wasting time trying to find something to eat so in here is the main storage area and back up to this top left area is another door so we don't need to we need to keep this open so we don't block this this and this are two studs in the wall that were for aluminum doors or walls i should say right here to separate different horses and those walls have been removed but those studs are still there so we have to design around those we also have two swing out doors down here to work with and we've designated this area in front right here you see this this horizontal bar we've designated this as do not add area because uh he wants to put like ladders in the back side here possibly we're just not adding anything right here so the design canvas is all of this space in here and we took this we took these measurements one morning he he pulled into my driveway and five hours later we ended up with this wireframe model so we had the trailer to work with as far as dimensioning stuff out we had a whole list of notes to work with as far as his specific tools his specific needs let me walk you through our design and you'll notice this design is just a wire frame there's no thickness to any of this and when you're trying to when i'm trying to work out a hash out of design with somebody else there's no need in spending the time to to get so specific with joinery and all the little details that will actually be in real life all we need is the major dimensions and make sure that stuff fits and if that's the case all we need for that is a wireframe model so in here with doors open this is a long horizontal slot here that is i think 52 inches off the ground and that is 50 inches off the ground for larger plywood offcuts from jobs that it can keep on hand for just random tasks if if the job that he's working on requires 10 sheets of plywood that are brand new well then you can put them here in the aisle and get to the job and there's no need in driving around with a massive amount of storage for plywood so this isn't that large down here is a spot for some some tables or some various other things that he had he had in this specific size so one thing to note real quick i told him that a couple days prior to that too to give me rectangular dimensions of all the stuff that you wanted to put in here go ahead and measure all of your stuff in a rectangular dimension what is the the length the width and the height of a volume of space that this could fit into and that's what we use to size all these components so this is plywood this is some staging tables then these are some other tools that he has underneath this side over here this long area right here the top part is being suspended right here this is a uh a walk board eight foot walk board up here is for various pieces of trim and longer offcuts this is kind of like a scrap bin on the go and for what he does for all these random little odd jobs that he does this is very important to him to have a location like this for oddball off cuts that most other contractors would kind of throw away he says if it's less than two feet he throws it away puts it in a burnt pile whatever but you know four or five six foot of of trim and all kinds of other stuff he can throw this up here and have ready access to it up here is another shelf we did add another vertical divider that's not shown here and then a shelf on top on this side over here is basically a wall of storage there's i think there is 29 26 drawers completely there's what four three that's seven that's 21 22 23 24 25 26 drawers uh to his specific sizes now he was under we were making sure that as we dimension this out now again this is just the wire frame so that 10 and a half inch opening is not going to be a 10 and a half inch deep drawer because you have to consider the drawer bottom and the drawer runners and making it make sure everything lines up all that good stuff so we came up with this wireframe model over here all the drawers and the top is cubby dividers which has a bunch of cuts in a bunch of dadoes in here that quarter inch plywood can be slid across so this took five hours or so to get to this stage on the first day the next day which wasn't a consecutive next day it was actually a few days later i turned all that into the final design which is this and we can see around here oh also i didn't mention uh this short wall over here accessed from the side door is the whole wall of sustainers or viewtainers i should say vutaners and yeah that's just a basic shelving unit nothing fancy there so here's the the final design over here all of these cutouts that i added were simply to reduce weight these cutouts in here were for him to fish his hands through and find some stuff but most of these other cutouts were to reduce weight this ended up being 25 full sheets of plywood something like that most of it half inch and it's all pine plywood so how did i get here i'm going to walk you through the process of basically turning one of these wire frames into a cabinet and then we'll talk about the cabinet itself so if i quickly go to my next scene that i already have set up and i'll hide all this stuff because my thinking is this is modular this is one cabinet over here i'll hide and then all three of these are identical they're just screwed together right one thing that i i did end up doing is my original plan was to make these sides all the way up to the top this all one solid side piece and have these dividers integrated but as far as manufacturing on the cnc machine it made much more sense to make the cabinets just the drawers and then have this top cubby section set on top so with my wire frame i'll hide these others and i can turn this wire frame into a model quickly and easily i'm just going to run through this it's probably going to be too fast for a lot of people but what i would do is i would copy one over here and i'd right click and say make unique that way i don't screw this one up because of this one all i want is the wireframe so i'll click and delete all of these faces real fast i don't want any faces i just want the wire frame around it because that's going to give me end points to stick to now also i don't need any of this top because like i said that's going to be a second section that i set on top let's go to a top down view let's see top down view and i can delete all of these lines and faces all at once and there we go let's go back to this view so this is the wireframe that i can build on and like i said i'm just going to run through it real fast all your dimensions are here for the perimeter so i can right click i'm sorry r for rectangle from this bottom right corner to this top left p4 push pull and pull this out by point four seven inches this is half inch plywood which is 23 30 seconds and that is 0.46 and some change something like that 0.47 inches works great for mortise and tenon joinery on the cnc machine so let's grab this and let's triple click g for component enter let's throw some color on it just so i can easily distinguish it from the background q for rotate and now i'm going to rotate this right into the front 90 degrees what that does is it puts that front face in line with all of these lines so i can use this for setting up my mortise and tenon joint so if i reference back over to modules you'll see that each one of these drawers i pull this all the way out has a runner and the drawer rides on that runner the runner itself is mortise and tenon into the side if i drop the second color on there you can see how that works there's mortise and tenon joints from these runners into the sides all the way down every one of these cabinets are just like that so if i hide all of this hide that side you'll see that these taller cabinets are like that as well minus the bottom sections these drawers were so large that we decided to go with full extension drawer slides for those so lots and lots and lots of mortise and tenon joints so to do those my lines are already here i can edit this part t for tape measure let's come in by 1.5 inches let's come in by 1.5 inches r for rectangle and like i said we're only doing these this top section so let's go in this direction and let's see the lower light lower right hand corner shows my dimensions the first one is the longer of the two so let's go with two comma 0.47 enter that gives me this mortise right there m4 move control brings up copy i'll copy one over to here and then i'll press divided by two to give me three symmetrical mortises on this panel i no longer need these guidelines left and right those are distracting i'll get rid of them i can select the mortises m for move control brings up copy and i'll go from this end point up to here and i know the spacing is even so i can press x3 to multiply what i just did by three and there we go so now my mortises are there but here's a here's a quick little trip tip for you i can p4 push pull and pull this back point four seven inches enter and get rid of it and then double click to go through all of those sometimes that's a little time consuming when you have say 30 or 40 of those to do so here's one thing that you can do you can go to let's go with a top down view so now i can select just the thickness of my material minus the front face this is outside the wire frame so this is the front face selecting the back and the sides and the top and the bottom delete it and some of you're thinking that's kind of crazy why would you just delete something that you just uh you know made into a you know component for the thickness the reason being is it's much easier to spacebar triple click to select everything hold shift to double click to deselect what i just had over there and that leaves me with just the area selected delete that push pull and push this back 0.47 inches so just a little work around to know your selections as far as push pulling and which is faster which is which is easier so now that i have one side done i can rotate this back into place m4 move control brings up copy they are symmetrical so they go right there so you can see how this gets built pretty quickly and from that same concept i can start putting stuff inside one another so uh r for rectangle let's just go from here to here and the first dimension is the longer the two i'll leave that and i'll change the second one only by pressing comma four enter so that's four inches wide p for push pull i'll push this down point four seven inches for the thickness spacebar triple click actually no not yet i still need to make the joinery real quick let's just say that let's go to this side over here so i can see it a little bit better without this being in my way i want to make a pair of of box joints basically i don't know what you'd really call this uh so let's draw a rectangle right there dimensions say that the first one is the longer of the two so i'll press 1.5 comma enter to modify that now i want to center this perfectly so m for move from this midpoint and i'll press r for right uh r i'm sorry right for red to constrain to the red and i'll drop it off at the midpoint back here so now i know that's perfectly centered now that it is selected m4 move control brings up copy copy it into the back and what i can do is grab this push it back by .47 inches and go to this side and push this one back to that point 0.47 inches basically what i'm doing is drawing box joints onto the pieces space bar triple click g for component enter so that i can trace them on everything else now i can get this side piece r for rectangle and i'll just draw these two rectangles real fast p push pull whoops other direction and there we go so now i have a box joint that will be cut out perfectly on the cnc machine i can hide this and you can see the difference right there that's that's the two pieces of the box joint so this is the this is the joinery for the entire build box joints right here on edges and then mortise and tenon joints in the middle that's that's the joinery for absolutely everything and that's the process so i'm gonna go ahead and delete all of that so i don't get confused go back to my modules scene and that whole theme is as continued all the way along as you see there's a front and a back on top the back pieces have two back pieces and then the bottom of each cabinet has two bottom pieces so individually this is kind of flimsy there's not much not much there to prevent racking so i wouldn't trust this for like a bedroom dresser you bump into the side and the front it's probably going to rack quite a bit and do it enough it's probably going to break something but when you consider all of these screwed together all of these screwed to the wall in the back you'll have a lot a lot of rigidity without having to have a face frame and without having to have a solid back panel so let's talk about the drawers really quick the different colors here designate different size drawers this red drawer is one that's going to be doubled up with full extension slides for pretty darn heavy stuff this one's basically going to be super heavy stuff these purple ones are into individual drawers for uh heavier stuff but they need full extension slides and then all of these other drawers are not that heavy of stuff so it's just going to be wood on wood which isn't that bad at all so the way i make all of these is uh the the drawer runner i'll drop a different color on it so you can see the drawer runner itself has three tenons that go into those mortises that we that i showed you a second ago so if i hide this you'll see that the three tenons stick out and after the cnc machine cuts it uh oh after it's cut out they'd literally just clip together a little bit of glue a clamp some brad nails you're done assembly is incredibly fast with this style of construction so for the drawers what i do is i extend the drawer front down by the thickness of the plywood so it stops right here on the slides that way no matter what even if there's basically no matter what the front of the drawers are in line with the front of the cases i did not add the circles for the drawer poles because in sketchup it creates um in sketchup it creates a bunch of segments for the circle rather than arcs so i just put crosshairs here and then i add the circles in in my cam software vcarve so the drawers themselves are pretty pretty darn simple let's select everything hold shift to deselect this everything else is selected h4 hide and we can focus on one drawer it's the exact same concept as the case it's box joints everywhere the bottom is box joint jointed jointed into the sides and then the back but the bottom is actually mortise and tenon into the front now it's important in my opinion to make sure that these sides have two fingers on this connection and then the front only has one finger on this connection the reason being is you're going to have this is going to be glued together but we are going to have brad nails being fired through this through the joint in all directions and if you think about this if you put two brad nails here two brad nails here that's four brad nails perpendicular to the travel direction which is much greater than if we flip this around and only put two in this middle one you only have two in this one in that direction so the brad nails are going to add theoretically some strength as far as this front panel being pulled off that's the thinking anyway and then all of the drawers as i swat a fly in front of me sorry all the drawers are built the exact same way they're just sized slightly different now on on the the drawer fronts on these larger drawers if i select everything minus this drawer uh this one the drawer fronts don't have mortises on them all four sides are built the exact same way and this is like big big kid legos everything just clips together it's pretty darn satisfying watching all this stuff come together so that's how i did these these drawers basically these cabinets and then these these cubbies go on top so i took these boards here and i just used the cnc machine to cut all these dados and then you just stack them with horizontal or vertical dividers put a back panel on it and the back panel massively stiffens all of this up and there you go that's going to be much easier to set in on top this other side was kind of very specific there's no joinery on this side there's no cnc box joints there's there's no no joinery of any kind it's all just butt joints with pocket hole screws this is all this will all get bolted to the wall and that's all that's necessary there's no need to go crazy with uh specific joinery on this side so that's basically it for the design uh we we took or i took i forget exactly 8 to 10 hours something like that to turn the wireframe into all of this but i also during that time took it a step further and made a layout so i broke down every single part onto the sheets and i know you can import all this stuff into v-carve and have it nest it for you but you lose you lose a little bit of of specifics i want to be able to have full control over this so it didn't take me much time and effort at all to lay all this stuff out flat in the orientation that i wanted it to be laid out and then also something to consider if with a job like this i'm going to be running the cnc machine cutting all of this stuff out i'm not really going to be assembling much at all so the other people need to be working while the cnc machine is cutting so if the cnc machine scatters all i'm sorry if vcarve the the nesting software scatters all the parts on all the different machines of the sheets to maximize efficiency which is great most of the time it may also scatter the parts to where it slows down the assembly because you don't have all the components to complete your specific subassembly if that makes sense so i laid all this stuff out this is all the all of the sheets this one actually went yellow we ended up going half inch on this one so all of these sections right here plus this one are half inch plywood this green one over here is quarter inch plywood and all of these are three quarter inch plywood and from there i deleted all the 3d geometry for 2d geometry and imported all this on a layer and v-carve so that's just kind of the way that i did it to get the most amount of control and then of course in vcarve you have to go through and add dog bones to all this stuff i wish there is a gadget for that but anyway i thought that would be an interesting video to walk you through how i go from wireframe to actual uh sketchup design and also the reason behind it like i said there's no need for him to the contractor to sit there with his notes and watch me spend a little bit more time getting all this stuff done when we can simply focus on the basics the wireframe model everything that i do in sketchup starts with a wireframe model if i'm building a dining table i've already got a pre-predetermined notion of of the overall size that i want to have this table to be and i'll create a 3d wireframe that i can work inside of so i know that i'm always constrained to those particular dimensions that's it for this video hopefully it helped if you are interested in uh purchasing the the vcarve file for all the cnc stuff for this as well as this sketchup model i'll have all this for sale on my website you guys take care have a great day and i'll talk to you in the next video