I know this was designed for PG medium plywood, but that isn’t precise enough to work with, I need to know exactly what the slot thickness is so I can convert it to the desired slot width of 0.057". To do that:
Find a nice horizontal or vertical slot [choosing horizontal or vertical will make measurement easier]. There’s a good one in the roof (top part of this page of the design), to get to it I need to enter that group. Double-click on the roof part, it’ll let you work with individual parts of the group. You’ll know you’re in the right place when you see the “done” button
Thank you @evansd2 for the very clear explanation of the process of scaling down (or up) a design. Also I am impressed with your patience and skill assembling the resulting tiny house.
Thanks again for the explainer. This should help the people that ask “can i scale this” about catalog designs.
Yes if you’re scaling to a different material size.
No if you’re just looking for double with the same material size. I mean, you CAN, but you need to ungroup the parts at that point and adjust all the slots and tabs
It was a little tricky, mostly because you have to use tiny amounts of glue on some parts. I use a needle bottle (previously discussed here) and it went pretty smoothly. It’s a clever design.
It was also a bit fiddly because I chose to go with a fairly good friction fit on the slots. Not much margin for error and you have to align some slots semi-blind due to the way it’s assembled. I’ll admit to a bit of grumbling, but it all came together. If you’re committed to gluing every part then you could go with a wider slot and make assembly simpler, but I was trying to avoid glue where possible.
Irony: I ended up gluing almost everything.
Yeah there’s just no good way to do that without an external editor and you can’t export catalog designs. This is why I use clones for my slots when designing things, I can easily resize the slots to accommodate different material thicknesses without scaling the entire design.
The good news is that I wanted the house to be smaller, so it all worked out!
I’ve bookmarked this so I can easily refer to your formula for scaling. Thank you so much for your dedication to all GF users. You rock! And that tiny house is super adorable!
I’m trying to figure out how to scale it to our other lot here. Probably need an architect to draw up real plans for the builder & permits. Don’t think they’ll take the lasered version and let me say - just make it 100 times bigger But it would make an awesome guest house or rental unit.
I do the same thing but not only for 1/2-size or similar. When I started using PureBond sheets as my go-to material, they are sold as 5/32 but not quite. Regardless, they were thicker than PG maple, for example, so I would adjust the overall scale of a design to suit.
I wrote it up on the forum, let me dig up the thread. Aha, here we go, from 2019. It covers the concept of clones and what they can do you you. It’s a bit broader than just slots, but that’s ok.
Before I cut out the slots, I save my file and make a dupe of it, to keep my original file as-is. Then cut the slots out. That way if I want to make different slots later, I still have my file that I can easily edit. (I mean, it’s not the end of the world if you have to remove the slots to restore the file back at it’s original but it’s nice to not have to do that.)
It’s not impossible. Not saying YOU want to do it, lol
But I don’t make designs with that many tabs (and I haven’t noticed @Aloha making designs with that many tabs). It’s a pain but I’ve had to do it before. Those are the lessons I remember, the ones that were a pain!
But it would make an awesome guest house or rental unit.
