Drafting for woodworking in Sketchup

I’ve been using Qcad for a year or two in order to do simple 2-d drafting for woodworking projects. It works just fine and I know how to get around in it efficiently. But it’s been a bit cumbersome at times.
I’d tried Sketchup briefly two weeks ago when thinking about making the tv stand. But it was new to me and I didn’t want to give the time to learn it. Eric and Jason were bending my ear about Sketchup, so this weekend I gave some time to trying to re-draft the minimal 2-d mock-up I’d done for the dining room panelling I’ve been needing to finish for a looooong time (so I can get on to the cabinet and beams in that room).
This is extremely minimal in qcad and it got the job done, once I’d done some math and figuring on paper. I don’t believe in qcad one can group things. That would make it more useful for mocking things up as I try to develop an idea and remove a lot of pen/paper work.

Sketchup on the other hand has groups and components. The third dimension of things is pretty easily pushed and pulled out of 2-d sections, which you can even create by tracing sections from your millwork supplier’s photos / web imagery (though some might even have their stuff in the Sketchup’s 3d warehouse?). Eric pointed me at a dimensional lumber plugin. With this and the grouping/components it’s really easy to virtually assemble a project, get a feel for how it actually looks and try shifting things around to play with proportions.

The main things I’ve had to figure out were:

• Where/how to click to get the tools to infer what I’m trying to imply (really 3d can be a pain given 2d display and input devices)
• When to use push/pull vs. scale (haven’t quite gotten the follow-me tool down yet)
• How to draw guidelines…this was key. In 2d (whether Qcad, pencil/paper or other) for me it’s all about drawing guidelines especially when projecting a front to side and top views. The tutorials I’d looked through on Sketchup didn’t really talk about guidelines.
• And again where and how to position/click the mouse to get things to jump onto the guidelines/points.
• Figuring out that you can start a rectangle (for example) then select pan/orbit tools to move elsewhere in the composition and then reselect the rectangle tool and it will still be waiting for the second point to finish defining the recetangle.
• To push/pull/edit part of a group/component you can explode it (bad) or edit group/component. That sort of visually drops you into changing just the selected group/component.
• Oh and realizing I could just type distances/dimensions without actually mousing over to the distance/dimension input box and putting the focus there. There isn’t a visual hint to indicate the focus is already there and for some reason it looked like the focus was specifically not there to me.

In hindsight all of this was fairly obvious/expected and it’s impressive that with only a few hours of playing around I feel quite proficient in a new 3d CAD program.
I like doing drafting and am having fun trying to make furniture. Learning this new tool should make me more productive!
Now if only it were available on linux.