Timber Framing Tools

Sketchup extension for designing and building timber frames

Timber Framing Tools for SketchUp was crafted by Valdemar Mejstad (valdemar@mejstad.se).

Features

  • Create shop drawings
  • Dimension tool to easily add horizontal dimensions to shop drawings
  • Basic angular dimension tool to add angular dimensions to shop drawings
  • Mark reference faces (primary and secondary)
  • Marking timbers as "in progress" and "done"
  • Marking tenons and cutting all mortises at once
  • Trim solid and keep component instance intact
  • Export timber list to Excel

Requirements

The Timber Framing Tools extension works with SketchUp 2023 and later.

How to use

Timber Worker Tool

Hovering over a component instance highlights all instances and mirrored instances.
Click on a timber (any component instance) to open the shop drawing for that timber.
CTRL + Click on a timber to change it's state. Red = in progress, Green = Done.
CTRL + ALT + Click on a timber to change the state of all instances of the same component definition.
Red = in progress, Green = Done.
ALT + Click on a timber to rename component.
TAB cycles through highlighting timbers with shop drawings and highlighting non-solids.
Use the menu item Reset All Progress States to clear the state of all timbers.

Trim Tool

First Click on a solid. This will be the cutter.
Second Click on another solid. This solid will be the target being cut into by the cutter solid.
Use Tab to toggle between selecting cutter or target first.
When the first solid is selected, use CTRL + Click to keep the first solid selected and ALT + Click to make the target unique before cutting.

The Trim Tool does the same as the Sketchup Pro feature "Trim" except that it keeps the cutted component instance intact and tries to avoid transferring of instance material to faces.

Reference Face Marker Tool

Click on a face in a component to set that side as primary reference face.
CTRL + Click on a face to set that side as secondary reference face.
Click on a reference face (magenta or yellow) to unmark it.

Tenon Marker Tool

Click on a face in a component to mark the tenon. At least a part of the face should be inside the mortise timber.
Click on a marked face (red) to unmark it.
CTRL + Click on a face to not mark parallell faces of the same size.

Cut mortises

This command cuts mortises for all marked tenons. This may take a while on larger models.

Select the timbers that the cut mortises command should process.
If no timbers are selected, all visible timbers will be processed.

Export to Excel

This command exports all selected timbers to Excel. If no timbers are selected, all visible component instances will be exported. The exported Excel file can be used to calculate lengths and quantities of timbers to order.

Working with shop drawings

The following commands and tools can only be used when a shop drawing is active.

Rotating timber

To rotate a timber first select the Timber Worker Tool.
Click to "roll" timber upwards or use arrow keys to rotate timber in any direction.

Add Timber Sides

Adds all other sides of the timber to the shop drawing. Use the Eraser Tool to remove an added side.

Shop Drawing Dimensions Tool

First Click on the point of the timber that should be the startpoint (zero point).
Then Click on other points to add horizontal dimensions.
Shift + Click to add horizontal dimensions from two points at once.

As a bonus, Ctrl + Click on startpoint (zero point) creates all horizontal dimensions at once.

Use the Eraser Tool to remove a dimension. Offsets are automatically recalculated.

Angular Dimension Tool

First Click on the center point of the angle.
Then Click on the first leg of the angle and
then Click on the second leg of the angle.
Lastly, Click to place the angle text.

Close Shop Drawing

Closes the shop drawing (deletes the scene for the shop drawing). The shop drawing is still there and will be shown again when clicking on a timber using the Timber Worker Tool.

Delete Shop Drawing

Deletes the shop drawing. This deletes all added sides, all dimensions etc.