CAD Software -- free

[seal killer]

All--

Do you use any free CAD software? How do you like it?

--Bill

[Bill Shields]

Yes . But then I work for a CAM company, so 'free' is a relative term.

It took me a while to warm up to it, but I have found that Fusion covers all of my design and drawing needs

No idea what the going rate is - but it is more than capable of doing the job.

No - I do not work for Autodesk.

[GlennW]

I tried Fusion a couple years ago and got fairly competent with it and didn’t really have a use for it so never used it again. Last week I downloaded the free version again and am learning it all over again!

It is free for non commercial use with a few restrictions.

https://www.autodesk.com.au/products/fu ... 0/personal

[dorin]

It is not free, but I like ViaCAD.
It is not as good as professional tools. My son, the real mechanical engineer, didn't care much for it.
But for me it is intuitive enough and has few bugs.
https://www.punchcad.com/punch-viacad-2d-3d-v12

You can find older versions on Amazon and eBay fairly cheaply.
Here is a cheap copy from Office Depot!
https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/ ... lsrc=aw.ds

I like Estlcam too:
https://www.estlcam.de/estlcam.php

Also not free, but pretty cheap, and it does a really good job. A really good value.
(As far as I can tell, anyway!)

[seal killer]

Bill and Glenn and dorin--

Gentlemen, Thank you!

--Bill

[rmac]

Some time ago I tried two or three different free 3D CAD programs and eventually settled on Fusion. It seemed to have the most consistent user interface and the fewest bugs of the programs that I tried. I don't remember any more what the other programs were. The free version of Fusion has some irritating limitations designed to encourage you to sign up for a paid subscription, but they're not show stoppers for casual use on small projects.

Other good things about Fusion:

• It's integrated with the McMAster-Carr catalog in a way that lets you download 3D models of many of McMaster's products. This can be really handy sometimes if you're building something with a lot of off the shelf parts.
• If you take the trouble to assign materials to your parts, it will make nearly photorealistic renderings of your projects. The photos below show a stool I made along with Fusion's rendering of the 3D model. The model for the casters came from the McMaster-Carr catalog. (The actual casters came from Harbor Freight!)
• It knows about various kinds of joints, and will actually animate the action of mechanisms with hinges and pivots and sliders and whatnot.
• It knows about standard threads.
• You can use what they call "parametric modeling" to specify sizes of the parts and the relations between them. For the stool, I specified eight parameters ...
  
  Wood Thickness 1.5
  Seat Diameter 12
  Hub Diameter 5
  Foot Diameter 3.5
  Connector Radius 1.5
  Conduit Diameter 0.705
  Foot Circle Radius 11
  Seat to Hub Distance 15.875
  
  ... and the software figured out everything else. That's nifty enough in itself, but the real benefit is that you can change any or all of those parameters however you like and the program will reconstruct the model accordingly and update the 2D drawings as well.

Other not-so-good things about Fusion:

• While it's possible to make local copies of your files, Fusion is really set up to store all your projects somewhere in "the cloud". This may freak some people out.
• Since it's cloud based, Fusion won't do much without an internet connection. This also means it can be slow sometimes if your connection is slow or if Autodesk's servers are busy.
• You have to renew the free subscription every year.
• You will get a lot of email from Autodesk trying to get you to buy the not-free version.

One thing to note--once you have modelled a part, Fusion does a pretty good job of making dimensioned, 2D drawings that you can work from in the shop. But if you're more of a T-square and triangles kind of guy and don't want to get into the 3D stuff, Fusion is not for you. As near as I can tell, there's no good way to use it to make 2D drawings from scratch. You have to make a 3D model first and then let the program generate the 2D drawings from the model.

-- Russell Mac

[seal killer]

Russell--

Thank you for all that! I will check out Fusion while I lose the green color of my envy concerning your skill!

--Bill

[rmac]

rmac blushes

[ctwo]

I use FreeCAD.

https://www.freecadweb.org/

No online connection or registration and the designs are mine.

[rmac]

I use FreeCAD.

That reminded me that FreeCAD was one of the programs I was looking at when Autodesk added their restrictions to the free version of Fusion back in September of 2020. For what it's worth, here are some notes I made in an email to a friend about my impression of FreeCAD at the time:

From what I can tell, FreeCAD is a popular and capable 3D CAD program. So just for grins, I downloaded a copy and spent a few hours modelling a simple part and generating dimensioned 2D drawings of it. Like everything else, it has its pros and cons:

PROS

• It's open source, so it's completely free.
• The cloud is not involved.
• Generally speaking, it works the same as Fusion 360, so (since I had already figured out Fusion 360) it was pretty easy to get going.
• For designing single parts, it seems to work just fine and the drawings that it produces in the end look good.
• It produces STL files for use on your (or Mark's) 3D printer.

CONS

• It uses a bunch of different "workbenches" which sorta kinda work together to do what needs to be done. I'm guessing from this that it was assembled from a bunch of different modules that were developed by a bunch of different people without very good coordination. One result is that the user interface isn't very consistent among the various workbenches. As an example, some of them have you select various parts of your model and then click a button somewhere to do a particular operation. But in other places, you click the "do this" button first, and then select what you want it to work on. I found that confusing.
• A few times it just kinda stopped working. A couple of times this was because I accidentally changed to a different workbench without noticing. Other times, though, I couldn't tell if the problem was some similar instance of cockpit error or if the program had actually crashed.
• You can model threads by sweeping a thread profile along a helical path, but it doesn't know about standard threads like Fusion 360 does.
• Near as I can tell, you need to install an add-on workbench to work with assemblies of parts.
• The process of modelling a part is just a little bit clunkier than in Fusion 360.

BOTTOM LINE

I'm planning to stick with Fusion 360 and see if I can live with the new restrictions on the free version.

[benshell]

Not free, but for the last year I’ve been using Alibre Atom3D:
https://www.alibre.com/atom3d/

So far I really like it, and I think it’s a great value for the money. I come from an engineering background and also have a lot of experience with AutoCAD, Mechanical Desktop, Inventor, Fusion 360, and Solidworks. I felt like Fusion 360 was so different from these other applications that even using it for a few years (since it came out) I never became as proficient with it as the others, and the licensing term changes, constant updates, and free versions limitations led me to looking for alternatives.

[Bill Shields]

All valid comments - complaints about Autodesk. Fusion has been finding its way and Autodesk "redefining itself" for the last 6 years or so.