While watching one of the Wood Whisperer Podcasts I saw him using a design tool called SketchUp to do general design on a table he was building. I had never seen this before. It was a free download, and after downloading it and using it I am very happy. It is fairly easy to use and it really gives you a good all around view of the proportions of your piece. If you are making a piece for someone else without a real set of plans you can give them a pretty good idea of what the final piece is going to end up looking like. It also has a really nice tool called dimensioning which basically gives you a detailed cut sheet with a few clicks of the mouse on the various pieces of your project drawing. This is my favorite thing about this because now instead of having a piece of paper laying around with numbers all over it I can actually look at the picture and see the cut dimensions and see what is being affected and maybe make it easier to notice if there is a mistake somewhere or if there is just a better way to do something. I also think it is almost going to eliminate all cutting mistakes because the drawing only works if all of your dimensions are right to start with.
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