My bride and I are working on furnishing a new room in our house. We think we need a couple of tables. A side table for a table lamp and a coffee table. I’ve been working up different designs for her approval. The most recent is shown here. The taller table is based on an English Arts and Crafts table dated to about 1890. I drew it as close as I could get to the original while working from a few photographs. The coffee table is just a modified version of the side table. I reused all of the parts and didn’t have to redraw anything to make it.

In the video I talk about a couple of methods of doing it. If you’re new to SketchUp, you might think of the Scale Tool as the one to use but that tool can stay in the toolbox. The problem with Scale is that it winds up scaling details you want to leave the same. For example, if you use Scale to scale the length of the long stretchers, you’ll scale the length of the tenons on each end by the same factor. If you try scaling the entire table as a whole, you also end up changing the width of the legs and other parts.

Generally, the best tool for the job is the Move Tool. You essentially move just what needs to be in a different location. For example, select the legs and the end stretchers on the right and move them out to where they need to be. Then open an intermediate component such as the long stretcher or the front apron for editing and select just the end that needs to move to the just moved components. You can use inferencing to determine the move distance since the mating parts are already over there and waiting. I did a blog post a long time back that shows modifying a piece of furniture that way. You can see  it here.

In this video I make some modifications with the Move tool but I also show another way that works for some of the resizing process utilizing FredoScale which is available from Sketchucation. If you are installing it for the first time, make sure you also install the required LibFredo6 support files. You need to be a member to download these files but you can sign up for a free membership if you wish.

One thing to note about using FredoScale to resize the components en masse is that it results in all the components becoming unique. That is, instances of the same component each become unique and are no longer related to each other. While it makes it fast to resize the entire model, it does potentially cause other problems later if you need to make detail changes.

–Dave