CabWriter Comprehensive – Part 6

Cabinets Added in Part 6 - Notice the Slab Door on the Cabinet at Right

Cabinets Added in Part 6 – Notice the Slab Door on the Cabinet at Right

In Part 6 we added three cabinets: a narrow standard upper, a two box cabinet with a standard upper plus diagonal corner upper, and a standard upper with two doors. The narrow standard upper was drawn with factory settings which resulted in a very narrow frame and panel door that looked out of place. I show you how to change the CabWriter Settings to select slab doors for upper cabinets and with the ‘Re-Draw Selected Cabinets’ tool, change the door to a slab door. See the rightmost cabinet in the picture at right.

In this part I also talked some about the Box Selector; the dialog box that opens after pressing the End key and sequences through each box of the cabinet. I pointed out that there are a number of things that you can change on a per box bases. These include the following:

  1. Box type
  2. Number of Doors
  3. Default side for door hinge
  4. Number of Drawers
  5. Number of shelves
  6. Number of shelf hole columns
  7. The gap between the wall and the cabinet back
  8. Divided Base and Divided Upper; number of shelves & shelf  configuration
  9. Box sheet goods material type and name
  10. Shelf trim and banding.
Box Selector Dialog Box Permits the User to Choose Some Per Box Options

Box Selector Dialog Box Permits the User to Choose Some Per Box Options

An example of why you might want to change something on a per box bases is; suppose there is a pipe behind one box of a multi box cabinet. For that box you might want to change the gap between the wall and the box back from say 1/2″ to 2″. Another example might be to expose a different box material of higher quality and different color. Suppose your face frame is cherry hardwood but for cost reasons the boxes are made of maple plywood – pre-finished. If one or more door fronts are going to have glass panels you may want just those boxes to be made of cherry plywood – pre-finished.

In Part 5 we left adding doors to the tall divided base until Part 6. We knew that this tall divided base needed to be moved back to integrate with the refrigerator base, but we added the doors first with the ‘Insert a Door’ tool. That got us into trouble when we then proceeded to move the cabinet back. The doors and the cabinet sides didn’t move with it. This highlighted both a strength and weakness of CabWriter Protected which CabWriter automatically assigns to any part changed by ‘Insert a Door’ or ‘Insert a Drawer’. I explained two methods for recovering and demonstrated one of them.

Lastly, we added mid rails to the end panel and doors because of their tall height. This required the use of the Re-Name Component tool. I also showed you some SketchUp tricks, again using the divided line, and then the Move/Copy tool with a distance indicated by the model which required no calculation for measurement.

With this summary of what you are about to see it is time to watch the video. Kick back, relax and let’s learn some more about CabWriter.