CAD Questions

[Flyinfool]

I chased a pencil around a piece of paper for a lot of years before CAD was even invented. I started using CAD at AutoCAD V2 back in mid 80s. I have never had a desire to chase a pencil around paper since. At work I use AutoCAD and Inventor. At home I use a combination of Solidworks and Fusion 360. Over the years I have professionally used 5 different 3D CAD programs. For home use I have learned another 5 different CAD programs. The very best was one of all, is one almost no one ever heard of, called IronCAD. Of course that is their problem, no one ever heard of it.

 

[Geswearf]

Graph paper and pencils built nations and there's no learning curve.

Not exctly. I have no background in CAD, and while using a machine shop at a local college, I signed up for a SolidWorks introductory course. To say the learning curve is steep for an older guy w/ no background rivals any British understatement. Add to my difficulties, was a 50 year gap between my last drafting class and this SolidWorks intro. I kept running into difficulty trying to get past dimensioning the drawing.

That said, for older folks (65+), many universities allow us to audit many courses for free. I discovered that once enrolled, (at least locally), I can get a university email address. SolidWorks offered a free student account to holders of such an email address, so if you want to learn the program, you can take a free course AND get to use the program for free.

BTW, I talked to a friend who is an engineer about solidworks, and he mentioned that a computer with enough muscle to run this program will not be cheap.

 

[WobblyHand]

Not exctly. I have no background in CAD, and while using a machine shop at a local college, I signed up for a SolidWorks introductory course. To say the learning curve is steep for an older guy w/ no background rivals any British understatement. Add to my difficulties, was a 50 year gap between my last drafting class and this SolidWorks intro. I kept running into difficulty trying to get past dimensioning the drawing.

That said, for older folks (65+), many universities allow us to audit many courses for free. I discovered that once enrolled, (at least locally), I can get a university email address. SolidWorks offered a free student account to holders of such an email address, so if you want to learn the program, you can take a free course AND get to use the program for free.

BTW, I talked to a friend who is an engineer about solidworks, and he mentioned that a computer with enough muscle to run this program will not be cheap.

You can run FreeCAD on lesser machines. I have run it for simpler models on a Raspberry Pi. A normal PC will work ok for most starting out. Bigger, better, faster all help, but FreeCAD will run on a lot of machines. I taught myself 3d CAD at age 66. Should of learned it a lot earlier. Just used videos and followed along. There were many times that I had to replay the videos, but fortunately the video didn't care.. For some of the videos I had to play them at 3/4 speed so I could catch something that I missed. Just keep on plugging, you will get there. It took me about 3 weeks to start to be able to do stuff totally on my own, but that was three weeks, 5-6 days a week. At least for me, I had to put in the time, to get the concepts imprinted into my mind. So not too much different than taking a class, as far as hours.

 

[BWS Arms]

I’m looking at trying Shpr3D. Its not solidworks but I think I can learn it faster.

 

[Shotgun]

Whichever package you look at, getting a good starting tutorial is critical to your happiness with it. So many of the tutorial videos I've seen are done by experts, who can't seem to bring themselves to the understanding that we're watching the video because we don't know how to use the program. They're clicking all over the place and you have no idea what is going on.

For FreeCAD, I recommend this guys series:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc0UszswD0oD5q4VeWTrK7JC

He starts at the most basic operations, all the way down to setting up the environment. It is well paced so that you can keep up, without just dragging things out. He speaks clearly, and the audio is excellent. Finally, the examples he uses are well chosen to demonstrate the use of the particular feature that he is demonstrating. I suggest you work on the first five or six videos until you can follow along comfortably, and then jump around to features that you're interested in.

 

[RickKr]

Whichever package you look at, getting a good starting tutorial is critical to your happiness with it. So many of the tutorial videos I've seen are done by experts, who can't seem to bring themselves to the understanding that we're watching the video because we don't know how to use the program. They're clicking all over the place and you have no idea what is going on.
...sni

I agree wholeheartedly with Shotgun. For Fusion 360, I tried one, which fit the description, but have since found this one, which is excellent.

 

[RJSakowski]

Not exctly. I have no background in CAD, and while using a machine shop at a local college, I signed up for a SolidWorks introductory course. To say the learning curve is steep for an older guy w/ no background rivals any British understatement. Add to my difficulties, was a 50 year gap between my last drafting class and this SolidWorks intro. I kept running into difficulty trying to get past dimensioning the drawing.

That said, for older folks (65+), many universities allow us to audit many courses for free. I discovered that once enrolled, (at least locally), I can get a university email address. SolidWorks offered a free student account to holders of such an email address, so if you want to learn the program, you can take a free course AND get to use the program for free.

BTW, I talked to a friend who is an engineer about solidworks, and he mentioned that a computer with enough muscle to run this program will not be cheap.

Great idea about the University class.

I run SolidWorks 2012 on a computer with 12 GB of ram running Windows 7 Ultimate. 64 bit. The hardware for most current computer should be adequate. The most important thing is the video card. SolidWorks lists what minimum operating system requirements in order to run their software on their website.

 

[Jspan]

I like Solidworks you can get what they call 3d experience for $50 a year and it includes Solidworks Professional cad and a bunch of other programs. There is a online class called Solid Professor it's got all kinds of training for cad. I know it has Solidworks and Fusion 360 for sure but it has a bunch of others as well. I took classes at my Community College and all they done is give you a subscription to the Solid Professor.

 

[RJSakowski]

There was a series of book published called the SolidWorks Bible from 2003 through 2010 by Matt Lombard. They are excellent deference books for SolidWorks. However he stopped publishing them after 2010. Much of the content is still valid though.

I find the most difficult obstacle to learning CAD or CAM software is learning the design philosophy. After that, learning where to find all the secret sauce to make things happen. What is frustrating at times is knowing that you should be able to define a feature by defining certain parameters by the CAD's math engine doesn't allow it. Oftentimes there is a workaround that can be used to obtain the desired results. The next obstacle for me with my aging memory is knowing which context related drop down menu I need to access to perform a certain task. Somewhere in the distant past I used it but..... This was my greatest roadblock in migrating from SolidWorks to Fusion.

I find that repetition is the best way to commit processes to memory but unfortunately, having SolidWorks already, there wasn't a need to immerse myself in Fusion. Perhaps the best way would be to lock myself in a room for a month with a computer having nothing but Fusion on it.

In retrospect, I transitioned from AutoCAD to SolidWorks and because I was using it at work at the time , I picked up the fundamentals in less than a week. It doesn't really take all that long starting with some tutorials and transitioning to your own designs. A good reference with examples of the more complex processes permits picking up new skills.

 

[GeneT45]

I disagree with the recommendation for the SolidWorks Bible - it was a huge disappointment for me. I had substantial, but not comprehensive CAD experience at the time and found it tedious to learn. (And don't get me started on the ****show that is SW electrical...)

I wholeheartedly agree with the notion that the most difficult part is learning the philosophy - something I've seen little of in most tutorial information. For years I lived in a sort of CAD purgatory where I had to use differing CAD programs (based on customer preference), which meant that I became adequate at a lot of software, but expert at none. Now that that is over, I have committed to Alibre and am much better off for it.

Unless you have substantial reason to do so, I suggest staying away from SolidWorks. It's great software - perhaps the best mechanical CAD there is - but it's outrageously priced, and you never "own" your copy. For the home shop guy, and the small business, I think it's a dud.

Please don't consider this an ad for Alibre. It's what I settled on, but there are lots of options out there and it's just the one that I most favored. *Do* consider this a recommendation for something that you can pull up, 10 years from now, when you want that one drawing again...

GsT