Morning,
I am after a cad program to input my knife designs and leatherwork designs into so I can get some templates laser cut…. what is out there that is good, FREE and easy to use?
Cheers

Google sketch up is good for beginners. Lots of support, too. Draftsight is a bit more technical. Probably harder to learn but might work out better for getting the laser cut files out. Both free

Easy to use C.A.D package. 😉

This looks the bee’s knees.

Stato… that’s my CURRENT cad package… needs upgrading….

2D? http://librecad.org/cms/home.html
very easy to learn

Draftsight. It’s free and easy to get started, plus it doesn’t use stupid proprietary file types and can open loads of different things.

AutoDesk Fusion 360 is Free for hobbyists. Easy to use and hundreds of videos/tutorials.

Draftsight for 2D or Onshape for 3D

DO NOT use SketchUp it’s not CAD whatever they say. Awful, awful application.

Second for Onshape. Crazy high solidworks pricing structure means we have been testing it out at work recently with a mind on switching completely in the future.

+1 for Draftsight.

Qubism on Android.

Great fun 🙂

+1 Draftsight (2D) – perfect for generating .dxf files for laser/waterjet cutting

+1 Fusion 360 (3D) – direct output for 3D printing

Thanks chaps…. will have a look later…

freecad

The draftsight workflow (keyboard commands etc) is very similar to AutoCAD so if you use that ine you are picking up AutoCAD skills too.

AutoDesk Fusion 360

This.
For work, I used solidworks for 10 years and solidedge for 5. I now do most CAD in Autodesk Fusion 360 covering parts, assemblies and drawings. I’ve used the outputs for laser cutting directly as well as fabrication and manufacturing by sub cons.

It’s also being updated quite frequently and I’ve had good success when raising issues.

DO NOT use SketchUp it’s not CAD whatever they say. Awful, awful application.

Its great at what it is, but it is what it is. If you’re non-cad trained then its pretty intuitive to use, if you are CAD savvy (or even just vector graphics savvy) its seems totally un-intuitive because your intuition is based on those conventions.

sketch up is easy to use but can take a fair bit of fannying to get from model you draw to the file a CNC machine will play with

I draft up my sculptures in sketch up (just because its what I’ve always used) but I need to keep an old version of sketchup 7 running – export my models to that in order to use a plugin that only works with that version to export individual faces as SVG files which then need tidying in inkscape to be ready to pass on to sheet cam then then into my plasma cutter

Keeps me busy

So does repeatedly trying to select a tiny dot to delete it before realising its a bit of dirt on the screen.

Fusion 360. It’s a proper thing and there’s tons of stuff on youtube

The thing is I am a total novice so need something that is fairly intuative but more in depth than paint!

This guy does some good videos to explain stuff