Dog Bone & T-Bone Joints SketchUp — CNC Parametric

T-Bone or Dog Bone Wood Joints in industrial wood furniture are most effective when cutting boards by CNC machine — and these SketchUp dynamic models make them parametric. Dynamic Sketchup TBone Wood Joints Models for use in batches, fully compatible with Abf Plugin . Helps draw Tbone wood joints very quickly. It will be very slow if this wood joint is drawn by hand using Sketchup or Autocad.

The reason these joints exist at all is geometric: a router bit is round, so it physically cannot cut a sharp internal 90° corner. The dog-bone relief must have a radius at least equal to half the cutter diameter (e.g. 3 mm relief for a 6 mm bit) — set it any smaller and the bit leaves material in the corner, so the square tenon will not seat flush. That is why a parametric model is worth more than it looks: change the bit and you re-key one number instead of re-drawing every corner.

Parashape Sketchup Pro

Dog Bone Joint SketchUp Setup for CNC: Snap Points with Scale Tool

• Open the Component Options panel.
• Hide the joints to snap the exact points.

Hiding the joints before scaling is not cosmetic — the rounded dog-bone arcs add extra endpoints that SketchUp’s inference engine will happily snap to, so leaving them visible is the usual cause of a “scaled” panel landing a few millimetres off.

Set the number of copy panels

• Hide Panels : hide panel at the bottom, top or both.
• The model auto calculates equal spacing between panels.
• Set the setback panel of the shelf.
• This setback usually applies to cabinets with inset doors.

Joint setup

• Hide Joint: Useful to snap points when using scale tools
• The inward setback space.
• Number of edges to apply joints
• Number of joints per side.
• Radius, depth and width of joints.

The depth value matters as much as the radius: for a blind tenon it should stop short of the mating panel’s face, while a through tenon needs depth equal to the full panel thickness. Match the joint width to your real sheet thickness (typically 18 mm MFC/MDF) rather than a round number — a 1 mm mismatch turns a press-fit into either a loose joint or one that splits the board when knocked together.

Nesting CNC panels with Abf plugin from SketchUp

• Select objects
• Click Clean Dynamic before using Abf.
• Enter Abf’s settings.
• Establish Dog Bone intersection.
• Clich Intersect tool.
• Double-click on the Joint Panels to create the intersection.
• Nesting to export 2d Dxf file.

“Clean Dynamic” is the step people skip and regret: a dynamic component still carries its live attribute formulas, and ABF will read the formula-driven sub-geometry instead of the flat faces — so the intersect either fails silently or exports doubled/ghost edges into the DXF. Explode the dynamic intelligence first, then let ABF cut and nest. ABF is free and its end goal is a DXF carrying separate layers for the cut lines and the milling (relief) lines, which is exactly what CNC nesting software expects.

Nesting to export 2d Dxf file. If you draw it manually, it will take a long time. When there is a new project, it must be redrawn. This is the fastest way to create a parametric dog bone CNC joint in SketchUp.