First thing, GSU is built for rendering large objects like buildings and towers. Not necessarily small parts like we use, so using GSU for CBGs can be challenging. The zoom you need makes handling the rendering hard as GSU wants to pan or orbit proportionately large.
As well, since GSU is architectural scale, I make a default template so that I am zoomed in to scale and don't have to do that all the time.
Setup 1) I open GSU and create a small rectangle (it helps to anchor the view) at the 0/0/0 axis point, then zoom in so that I can draw a 2"x2" rectangle and actually see it. I remove the larger rectangle that I created earlier too. I change the Units under Model Info to what you see here:
Note the use of Architectural for the inch fractions and the precision on length and angle. I remove the snapping as it's a pain to deal with.
I save the file as a .skp file in 'C:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 7\Resources\en-US\Templates' . This is where the program templates are stored. I then select this as my default template under Window>Preferences>Templates and select the filename of the template I created.
From there, every time I open GSU I am at the correct zoom and template. You can change anything else you need, but these are the biggest ones.
-WY
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-WY