joelh

It is such obvious common sense to have regulations for safety. Safety belts in cars. No lead in paints etc. Anyone who would oppose this is irresponsible and irrational. I cut my thumb off in a table saw. Have no idea how it happened. I now have a SawStop. The finest piece of equipment I have ever owned. I hope there will be more regulations covering planers and the worst - band saws. Grow up. Become adults. This is exactly the kind of thing the government should be doing. The idea that some utopian dream of the free market works is profoundly out of touch with reality

Dave,
I have 5 or 6 tools like dado, drill, create board, bring to front etc. I don't see how to upload these files to you from this blog. How do I get them to you.
Joel

Hello folks,
My main hobby is furniture making but I have gotten in to writing little ruby plugins to help out. One of the annoying things in all cad programs is the move command. you either have to set up some reference lines and then move your component to an intersection or point. Other way is to move a particular distance.
I wrote a little script that sets a component (that is already in the model) relative to another, fixed component. You just click a 'from point' on the component that is fixed, then click to 'to point' on the component that you want to move. A little dialog box pops up and you just type in the needed distance in the x, y, & z axes between the two points. Say you want table legs to be the same height, at the front, and 32" over. you type in X: 32
Y: 0
Z: 0

Well I am just working on it. It is a side hobby to my hobby of furniture making. With the demands on my time I would say at least a month. I have solved all the theoretical issues but writing code in Ruby is not the quickest thing for me.

Looks brilliant! He stole my thunder! I have been working on a Ruby script that first copies and makes unique a group of components, yet not making unique internally to the new group. then you click two point on a face on one of the components, input a dimension to expand the group of components (or vertices) parallel to the selected face and perpendicular to the two points. This allows one to resize drawers, stiled doors etc. in just a couple of mouse clicks. This is the same (I think) as this guy's stretch.

I am working (when I have the time) on a couple of ruby scripts that are intended on resizing things like drawers, panel doors etc. that resize only the things you want. The scripts are intended to work on a 'group' of components. So the drawer or door would be a group of milled and shaped boards that are components. The first script makes a unique clone of the original group of components. The key here is to make unique from the original group of components but not internal to the new group. ie the sides of the drawer are new instances of a new component.
The second script allows one to pick a spot on a face of a component, and then you input a dimension - say 1". then all components or faces or vertices in the group to the left of a plane perpendicular to the selected face and through the selected point move 1/2" to the left and the other side 1/2" to the right.
If you wanted to widen a panel door you would execute the script twice. Once on each side of the center stile.
So in a couple of mouse clicks you can resize complex groups leaving the jointing and thickness intact.
Anyone interested?
I have some other simple woodworking tools that I have written scripts for too.