MrMetric
Well-Known Member
There are some legal ways you can get some stripped versions of SolidWorks through professional organizations, often for the cost of the membership itself. That can often be a good way to go.
If you join the EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association) for $40 / yr Solidworks is included for personal use. It's real solidworks, not some watered down weasel version.<snipped> I would rather use Solidworks, but even the student licence is a bit steep. I do have ViaCAD version 10 that I have bought (£50 from Germany, legal) but it is not too user friendly.
The 4th axis is used for rotary table or dividing head.With respect to CAM and 4th axis - FreeCAD v.19 has added some "preliminary 4th-axis" features to its CAM capabilities. I'm not sure what that means, since I don't have a 4th axis, and indeed don't have a CNC mill. But just a word of encouragement that FreeCAD might be, now or in the near future, a viable alternative.
You buy Autocad 2000 on eBay.I am starting to get to know Design spark mechanical version 5. It's better than I thought and has some usefull features that I dont have in FreeCAD. To produce an oval shaped nameplate with text on a curved path I first created a drawing in Inkscape, a free programme. I then saved the drawing as an SVG and imported it into FreeCAD, another free programme. I then used FreeCAD to save the file as a STEP file to import into Design spark 5, another... Yep, free. There's a pattern here. In Design spark I can extrude the text and then add draft to it. There is a limitation to the amount of draft a shape will take. I can then save the file as an STL for 3D printing. I would rather use Solidworks, but even the student licence is a bit steep. I do have ViaCAD version 10 that I have bought (£50 from Germany, legal) but it is not too user friendly.
Dave:
You are going WAYYYY back with those two versions. They're only a a few years newer than the Autocad 10 that I started out on 30 years ago. On Ebay, If you aren't getting the original disks there's a good chance that you could be getting a pirated copy.
I'm not even sure if those versions of Autocad are 3D capable or not. Even if they are, their version of 3D cad will be a completely different animal than F360's version. Which may not be a bad thing, I've got a friend that used the 3D cad on full blown Autocad 2019, and didn't have any problems wiith it. But both he and I had problems with F360. This is highly subjective, but to us F360 just didn't feel right. To paraphrase the Clancey Brothers, "It baffled the hell out of us!"
Also both of those old Autocad versions are just drawing packages with none of the, at one time, built in goodies that the free version of F360 had. (Losing the goodies is kinda what this thread was about.)
Don
Blender is great for organic shape sorts of stuff, but it's always seemed too different from CAD for mechanical "drafting" sorts of uses, and their constraints seem all or mostly related to objects and actions on objects rather than to the relationships between line segments and such.
Very impressive work. I suppose if we are going to spend many thousands of £ or $ on machinery to make our models, then $1K for the software to help do it is reasonable. I wouldn't spend that much on software I didn't own. No matter how good it was.
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