My bed project is coming along. The Inventor model is done (minus possibly some marginal edits) and I'm now processing it for production.
The way this will work: I buy ~20 sheets of cabinet grade plywood (probably black walnut, from Robert's Plywood) and have it shipped to Old World Moulding. They'll take my part list and cut the pieces up in a big overhead router. The parts will then be finished with a light, clear polyurethane.
In order to make sure that all the pieces have the intended grain orientation, Paul @ Old World asked me to lay them all out in AutoCAD. Which totally makes sense.
Except that I've basically never used AutoCAD. I played with it a bit as a kid (incidentally, it was also on a bed project), but I've only used it in passing as an adult.
Anyway, I broke it out today and I think the results are passable. It took me a while to get the basics (units, etc) down, but I drew a bunch of 4'x8' rectangles to show the plywood sheet sizes, and then exported each part's face as a DXF and copy/pasted it onto a piece of plywood.
The result: Nineteen sheets should cover us for three full beds. I'm a little disappointed with some of the grain orientations, but it'll be fine. I'm also a bit worried about the nested parts (on the six nearly identical sheets on the left); we'll see what Paul says about that.
The only other thing of note is the red boxes on the right. Those parts have a beveled cut on one side, which needs to be done on a table saw (the router is only 2-axis), so I'm adding a bit of material to the parts.
I'm *hoping* that this shit gets cut this week. It'll be really nice to have a project wrap up :)