In trying to learn the oddities of cabinetmaker, I am making shop cabinets. This has taken almost a year. I could have made them the ‘old fashioned way’ in a month or two, but that wouldn’t have helped me learn Cabinetmaker and Easel, so I force myself to go through the “Design HELL” that is Cabinetmaker and Easel. I am learning. I’m learning both what I’m doing wrong and what is “operator Error”, as well as the myriad limitations and downright FLAWS with these computer programs.
Today’s issue:
I’m making an under bench cabinet that has several design elements that are impossible in Cabinetmaker. I want “drawers behind doors”, and I want a fixed shelf with adjustable shelves on top, with two drawers at the bottom. These elements are not possible currently in cabinetmaker, so I’ve done this build as two different cabinets and only cut out the parts needed and delete the unnecessary parts. The first build is just a cabinet with shelves and doors, so as to get the doors that I want. I couldnt get the fixed shelf the way I wanted, so I grabbed the Bosch Pony router and routed out the mortices that I needed, and just cut an additional ‘bottom’ part to use as the shelf.
then delete that and build a cabinet and designed another with drawers. In theory I should have been able to do a 'false drawer" at the top (Cabinetmaker misnames this “false front” - ALL of their drawers are false front, but that’s another issue). The trouble is that if one clicks on “false front”, the system does not just remove the top drawer, it removes ALL of the drawers.
Soooo…
I deleted everything and designed a ‘cabinet’ that is only the height of the space between the bottom and the fixed shelf. This allows me to get the ‘shadow holes’ cut on the sides (I just align the bottom of the ‘new’ cabinet design with the original sides).
On the original cabinet design, the parts imported into EASEL without an issue. From there I redesign the drawer fronts and backs. This must be done in order to use affordable hardware (need a 1" offset for the drawers with standard slides, whereas Blumb slides are thinner and so the drawer fronts and backs are too wide. Additionally, for whatever reason, Cabinetmaker makes the drawer backs too shallow, so I go in and enlarge that so the drawer box has uniform parts. (if an Inventables designer is reading this, please go look at what I’m talking about and you will see it to be true - I’ve mentioned it to Tec Support many times).
so, with these changes, I should be able to just cut out the parts right?
Not so fast!
When I upload the design from Cabinetmaker into Easel, the parts for the drawers are WAY too big!!! the two drawers have fronts that are 9.75", which means that the drawer box will be LESS than that. The parts imported have parts MUCH TOO LARGE.
The overall height of the cabinet box is 15.5" (subtract 1.5" for the box material and the overall height of the inside is 14"
The drawer parts that imported to Easel from Cabinetmaker are 9.25" & 13.75" = 22"
somehow, Cabinetmaker believes that I can install 22" worth of drawers into a 14" space.
Oddly, the drawer’s false fronts Imported perfectly and are 7.75" each.
Anyone know why this is happening and/or how I go about forcing the dimensions of what is under the “design” tab to be what is in the “Manufacture” tab and then export correctly into Easel??