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How to Create a Hardware List From an AutoCAD Drawing

Counting hinges, slides, shelf pins and connectors from the model instead of from memory.

The hardware is already in your drawing — every hinge, every drawer slide, every minifix sits where it will sit in the finished cabinet. The problem is turning that into a list you can order from, without counting it by hand.

Why the hardware list is where orders go wrong

Panel sizes are visible: if a part is missing from the cutting list, you notice at the saw. Hardware is different — a forgotten pack of shelf pins or two missing hinges only turns up during assembly, when the job is already on the bench and the supplier is closed.

Counting by hand has a second problem: it happens after the design is finished. Change a cabinet from two doors to three, and the tally you made yesterday is quietly wrong.

Let the layers do the counting

WoodPrep uses a simple convention: hardware lives on layers whose name starts with VAS_. Everything else is treated as a board part.

That one rule does a lot of work. The CALCE26 command scans every VAS_ layer in the drawing, groups what it finds by type, and counts it. Because it reads the drawing rather than a separate list, the count is always current — if you added a drawer this morning, its slides are in the list this afternoon.

Scanning the VAS_ layers and importing the finished hardware list into Excel. Hover to play, click to enlarge.

Step by step

Put hardware on VAS_ layers

Name the layers so they begin with VAS_ — for example VAS_HINGE, VAS_SLIDE, VAS_MINIFIX. The rest of the naming is up to you.

Run CALCE26

The command walks the whole drawing, finds every item on those layers and totals them by type.

Import Hardware in Excel

Open the companion workbook and click Import Hardware. Every item appears with its quantity, ready to price or to order.

What you end up with

If you also generate cabinets with WoodPrep, the hardware is placed on the correct layers automatically as the carcass is built — so the list works without any extra bookkeeping on your side.

Try it on your own drawing

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