Tiếng ViệtSketchUp
Curved Interlocking Shelf SketchUp — Half Joint CNC Nesting
Jun
The 3dshouse plugin SketchUp has many parametric models to quickly draw curved interlocking half joint shelves. The model library already has 2-way draw half joints , just need to manually draw more curves to create curved shelves assembled with half joints shelves
Video tutorial:
Step 1: Load the Curved Half Joint Shelf SketchUp Model
The model is highly customizable, you can adjust the model structure as you like. The purpose of this step is that you will have a standard size and structure to prepare for the next step to create a curve for the shelf. Adjustable parameters of the model
- Resize height, width, depth
- Change the depth of the mount, because the cut is curved, adjust the depth to 2/3 so that the curve does not cut through the mount.
- Hide 4 outer borders
- Change board thickness
- Change the number of panels horizontally and vertically
Set the panel count and overall size in Step 1 — not later. Once you run Clean Dynamic in Step 2 the model stops being a Dynamic Component, so every parameter field disappears and any resize after that just scales the geometry (it will not re-cut or re-space the half joints). Lock your grid here while it is still parametric.
Step 2: Manually create curves
- Select 3dshouse plugin’s
- Clean Dynamic tool click model to remove the dynamic feature, weld the panels together. Clean Dynamic is required before manual fix.
- Go to the mount bar group, use the divide command to divide the mount bar line into 4 parts. The purpose of creating a capture point.
- Use the Arch line command to draw a curve through 2 points, drag away the excess, do the same for the remaining bars
- Erase excess faces and lines.
- Copy similar groups
The native 2-Point Arc only produces a perfectly circular arc, so all your shelves end up sharing the same radius — which is exactly the look you want here. If you ever need each shelf to follow a different free-form sweep, the native Arc tool cannot do it; you would need a spline through the divided points (e.g. Fredo6’s BZ Spline / Catmull tool). Two more things that trip people up on this step: dividing the mount bar into 4 gives you the inference endpoints to snap to — turn on Length Snapping off and just hover until the green endpoint shows, otherwise the arc binds to the wrong segment. And because Clean Dynamic welds the panels into a single solid, you must double-click into the correct group before cutting, or the arc lands on the outer wrapper group and erasing the excess will delete a whole panel.
Step 3: Step 3: CNC Nesting with Plugin ABF — DXF Export
Nesting with the ABF plugin to export CNC cutting drawings (DXF) for curved interlocking shelf panels.
ABF only nests geometry that is genuinely flat — any panel that still has a curved edge as part of a 3D solid will be skipped or exported wrong. That is why the curved cut in Step 2 has to leave each board as a clean flat face before you hand it to ABF: the plugin flattens panels and lays them out for the sheet, but it does not slice solids or read cutouts that interrupt a flat surface. ABF runs on Windows SketchUp only (it has no Mac build), and it exports DXF with separate layers for cut vs. mill/engrave lines, so your CAM software can assign tool paths per layer in one pass instead of re-selecting curves by hand.
