Designing a Project Piece Using CAD

My friend Bruce is a big user of CAD, Computer-Aided Design and he's gonna show us how to actually produce a part on CAD, specifically, what he's gonna give us a lesson on, is the leg on this jewelry armoire here, took me some evolution in the shop to come up with that design, I think it's a little simpler for him Bruce, where are we going? What do you got? Well, I already have those legs, four of them drawn on here. Now I'm gonna show you how I created those legs and what I will do is, I know that they are one and a half by one and a half inch square. So that's kind of our starting parameter.

And I know that the foot is half inch by a half inch square. So just for us to catch up, go ahead with that one. And I'm gonna place that centered. So what we're looking at is the top of the leg, it's as though we're looking at it from the top, the little square that we're seeing in the center is the foot at the bottom. And what you did to get those two rectangles is you opened a window on the computer that you entered those dimensions.

So you didn't, I mean, I didn't see a draw a line on here but you just told the computer to make a square. Right. One and a half by one and a half and another square, half by half. Now what I'm making here, this is just the tapered part of the leg, so what I'm gonna do is I will take those two rectangles and I will do what's called a Multiple Extrude and we know that, that part of the leg the tapered part is 20 inches, so I've entered that. So extrusion is the process of pushing something out through a mold, happens in plastics all the time.

So it's kind of what we're doing here. You're looking at a two dimensional square, which you're now gonna tell the computer turn that into a task by pushing that square out into 3D. Yeah, now when we look at this you can see the highlighted one is the leg. You're doing upside-down buddy. No, that's just the way the computer did it, very easy to fix that.

I'll go to Front View and I just rotate it and then you can see it's the right way again. Okay, now that is just the tapered part of it, I need to add the flat part where the rails go. Because the taper doesn't actually originate at the end of the leg, it originates a little bit down from the top. And, there it is. So you stretch the leg.

Just stretch the top of it up, you can see that, that's nice. Now I'm gonna render this and you'll see that, that leg is still has no walnut color to it but that's pretty easy to change, I'll just do this and I'll give it some color. You're just picking a color off of a pallet there. And I will rerender it, there it is. Cool, now I look at this, I'm not happy with the foresight and taper, I don't think my wife's gonna be happy with the foresighted taper, so I wanna do another leg.

Well, let me do this first, when you need another one of these 'cause obviously four legs in the table. How do I get my other three legs? I'm guessing you did it redrawn. Wow, and you could do that forever? You could make a thousand legs will all be the same?

Yap. All right, now I want a leg that's tapered only two sides, not foresights. So you're gonna start you're drawing, my square. Move that off to the side, are you extruding? Okay, so same process, the difference is that you did not center the foot.

I moved the foot over to the there's only two side of taper. Now can you grab these legs? So on this double-sided taper, if I wanna see what that looks like from other directions, can we do that? Sure. Well, that's pretty cool.

This is a powerful aspect of CAD that basically Bruce started this stuff from scratch. Now, here you are in your shop, you go to the woodpile you find the right size piece, you cut it to length, you cut the taper, you look at the taper, you cut the other taper and what we just did in real time here in minutes would have taken me probably half an hour of setup and cutting in the shop, you got to set up your taper sled and get all that stuff going on. So this is a great proponent or a great way to advocate using CAD for your prototyping. Now, what else? Anything else the legs can bring us here?

Well, infinite options. Infinite options, so at this stage, I think the leg is too short and I want to make it longer but on the foot end, not on the top, can we stretch? So you're doing just a data entry off on the side, they're telling it 30 inch leg, wow! So it kept my three-quarter inch foot at the bottom. Absolutely.

But just drew the taper out, very cool, very cool. Well, I get it, I know Bruce was a big proponent of CAD instead of building these physical prototypes. And this is a great example of how you do it on your computer and the fluidity of making changes and why you would do it. Thanks for the spending the time with us today.