If you’ve been following my posts here in the Design. Click. Build. blog for any length of time you know I advocate using components in SketchUp. The component is a labor-saving device and there are a number of ways you can leverage them to improve your work flow. I’ve shown a variety of ways to leverage this power of components. Here’s another one.

 

While I was at my in-laws’ summer cabin a few weeks ago, I found a plant stand that was made by my wife’s grandfather when he was in Manual Training school back around 1910. My wife asked me to make a model of it so we’d have a record of it and this is what I came up with.

Interestingly there seems to be a variety of joinery. It’s mostly mortise and tenon but the rails and stiles are joined with dowels. When it came time to add the dowels, I used the process I show in the video. I could have added the dowels to the first stile and then copied the stile and the dowels when I made the rest of the model. In this case, though, I didn’t know about the dowels until after I had already created both the assembled and exploded versions of the model. Since I used components throughout the model, though, this little parlor trick makes quick work of it. I hope you can find some additional ways to put this to use.

-Dave