Popular Woodworking Editors' Blog

Back in October we launched a Google SketchUp Collection of projects that have been featured in Popular Woodworking and Woodworking magazines. Your response has been great, and we'd like to ask our SketchUp using readers to help us build the collection. Over the years we've published lots of plans, and most of them are available on the Projects page of popularwoodworking.com. Two-dimensional drawings are good, but 3-D models are even better.

Not sure how pieces in a magazine project connect? With SketchUp on your computer you can zoom in for a close look, disassemble it, measure the parts and even look at it with X-ray vision.

In addition to making projects easier to understand, SketchUp allows you to start with a design you saw in the magazine and quickly modify it to suit your needs. Like that bookcase, but want to make it narrower or taller? You can start with one of our models and make it shrink or grow. Need a smaller version of that cool workbench? Download our model, size it to your space and you have a working plan that you can print, with accurate sizes of the parts to make your cutlist.

We’ve been using SketchUp for a couple years as the starting point for projects you see in our pages, and we plan to put the models online with the publication of each new issue. We don’t have models of older projects in this format, but we get numerous requests for them. Here is where you the reader can help everyone out, and in return get rewarded in the process.

Make a model in SketchUp based on the published drawings for any project ever published in the pages of Popular Woodworking or Woodworking Magazine. Large furniture projects are great, but so are small projects, jigs and tricks. When you’re finished, send it to popwood@fwmedia.com. We’ll look it over, and if it is an acceptable model, we will add it to our collection listing you as the author of the model. In return, you get the following:

If we use your model in the collection, you will receive your choice of any of our annual CDs.
We’d also like to see your own projects – something you’ve made, or something you’d like to make. If we add it to our collection, you’ll get the loot mentioned above, and if we decide to publish it as a project in the magazine, we will pay you our usual author fees in real money.

Drop me an e-mail or leave a comment if you have any questions.

--Bob Lang



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