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Instant Woodworking Design

A design program for the woodworking masses?

The makers of DesignCAD have produced Instant Woodworking Design, a bare-bones CAD package that is aimed at novice woodworkers or ones who just want to crank out a fairly basic project. It is wizard-based and works as follows: You select one of the ten built-in projects, specify its dimensions, and then let the software work its magic as it calculates a scaled drawing and materials list. Several options are also provided if you wish to customize the rendered drawing. These include dimensioning, line drawing, hatching, filleting, and chamfering.

The built-in projects are a birdhouse, gun rack, foot stool, dog house, book shelf, plain shelf, wine rack, work bench, picnic table and rocking horse.  These are all pretty simplistic designs and for the most part, all you need to provide are desired dimensions and  project-specific parameters such as number of shelves, door sizes, number of wine bottles, diameter of hole in birdhouse and so forth.  Some of the designs are quite nice and I could definitely envision using this product to develop working plans from them. The birdhouse, picnic table, and perhaps the gun rack fit in this category. 

I was a bit disappointed with the bookshelf unit. It really is a bare-bones design (see graphic to right) and didn't offer details such as a kick-board, eye-catching top piece, or case back. Also, the rendered 3D drawing only included three shelves, not the five that I specified. But, the intermediate drawings did depict all five shelves with dimensions so not all was lost.

It's interesting to watch this program in action: After you select the project specs and tell it to create the drawing, the screen flashes repeatedly as individual components are being rendered. Various  objects in different colors come and go, scrolling from top to bottom, left to right, inside to outside, hither and thither, hence and thence, ... well, you get the idea... The important thing is that when all the gyrations are finished, you're left with a bunch of intermediate 2D drawings that represent different dimensioned views of the project along with a 3D overview drawing. The picnic table plan has 17 separate drawings! Note that all of the drawings and the generated materials list can be printed out.

Is this the easy-to-use, inexpensive CAD package that hobbyist woodworkers have been waiting for all these years? Well, let's just say it's a step in the right direction. If the project selection and design details could be expanded upon, then we would really be cooking with the grease here. Additional wizards to control things like coloring and texturing would also be nice. Still, the program does have its advantages - if you're planning to create bird houses and picnic tables in various sizes, Instant Woodworking Design could be a real time saver. Likewise, it's ability to automatically compute shelf sizes and spacing is an attractive feature if you're thinking about putting in lots of utility shelving. And for 30 bucks, it represents decent value for a basic CAD application - the kind that a hobbyist woodworker might actually pull out and use once in a while. Technical intimidation, an all too common shortcoming in design software, won't be an issue with this product.

Note that Instant Woodworking Design is also available as an add-on to Upperspace's DesignCAD 3D product. This is a much more sophisticated CAD package that comes in several flavors and offers features such as animation, solid modeling, 2D/3D modes, boolean operators, layering, annotation, and smart editing. It also has a symbol library, a nice built-in tutorial, and a bunch of drawing commands that are too numerous to get into here. The combination of these two products would allow you to quickly churn out a basic project like a wine rack and then use DesignCAD's capabilities to customize it however you want - without having to start from scratch. At least that's the general idea.