A friend of mine owns a large boat. It sits high enough in the water that some sort of steps are required to get on it from the dock. He called me up a week or so back and told me it’s time to replace the old plastic one and he wants to make some from wood. He sent me a couple of pictures of one he had seen and wanted to replicate and he asked if I could help him out. This is a sketch of what I worked out so far.

Here they are halfway into being folded for storage.

As I was going through the process of creating the model it occurred to me there are a number of places where SketchUp’s component feature can be leveraged to save some time and effort. In the video I’ll show you a few of those.

I also want to briefly talk about a sort of philosophy I try to apply when I’m creating models of furniture or other pieces that are to be built. As I work through creating the elements of the model I think about how I would make them in the shop. Often this informs how I’ll model the components. Which tools do I use? What is the order of operations? Can I batch operations to streamline the production? By keeping the process in the shop in mind as I’m modeling, I find it easier to prevent designing something that can’t be built either because of the design or the tools that are available. Of course sometimes I use that to justify the purchase of a new tool, too!

Anyway, I hope you find something you can use in this video.

Cheers,

–Dave 

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	Make Components Work for You in SketchUp Dave Richards demonstrates another way to use components to improve your SketchUp work flow.
	Using “Flip Along” for mirroring in SketchUp For models created in SketchUp, symmetry is easily achieved in an efficient way when using components and the Flip Along commands.
	Components Make Quick Work An example of using components in multiple models