Over the past several months I've rekindled my interest in woodworking. This past weekend I finished building a bench to install my lathe on. It's not the prettiest thing I've ever made, but it's nice and sturdy and so far is working wonderfully.
 
Before I began building the bench I sat down with Autosketch and drew up some plans. In college I used several of my electives in architectural drawing classes which used Autosketch (version 9 and 10 if memory serves), so Autosketch is fairly natural for most of the stuff I want to draw. My purpose in drawing things out before building is to give myself an idea of how much stock material I'm going to need and at least lay a foundation for how I'm actually going to construct and assemble a piece.
 
To date, I don't think I've built anything exactly as my plan called for. While building the lathe bench, I decided that I needed a bit more support down the center, so I added a piece. I made a change as to how I mounted the shelf that made the shelf assembly much easier. And I added a couple of pieces to square up the edge where bolts and washers clamped things together. Why the differences from plan to product?Skill. Either my skill wasn't enough to make a difficult bit easy enough to do or my skill showed me a better way to do something once I saw the pieces together.
 
So the question that pops into my mind is, why not have a program that can simulate woodworking? Go beyond just drawing the completed piece, but start with stock pieces, 2x4's, plywood, screws, rough cut lumber, etc. and work toward a completed project. I could let the program know my skill level, the types of tools I have available, my preferences for tool use. Then I could work through building a piece in my simulated shop and the program could figure out everything from a parts list to an approximate time needed to complete the project. Add in a bit of engineering code and the program could even tell me how much weight my lathe bench would hold (hopefully more than 600 pounds as the lathe is about 185 and I added almost 500 pounds of ballast...it seems to be holding up so far).
 
The reason no one has written such a program probably boils down to money. I'm sure there are folks out there capable of writing the necessary code, but the market for that code would be relatively small...and most in that market (myself included) would not want to spend a couple thousand dollars on the program, we'd rather use that money for another tool or some more wood.
 
When I was in college, there was still the thought that at some point the average business person would be able to take software modules and "write" their own custom code to do whatever they wanted. That day hasn't come and I haven't heard anyone express the sentiment in a while. Admittedly, for programmers, writing complicated code is now a lot easier. If I had more graphics experience, I might even tackle the woodworking simulator myself (and who knows, I might start playing with the idea just to increase my graphics experience), but this sort of program is still in the realm of needing developers.
 
I do think that this is the sort of program that could be constructed with the right modules and just a bit of custom code. But, the computer world has moved on and the modules haven't been written.