Back in college, I had a few classes on CAD (mostly for engineering design), and I became decently proficient with CATIA, SolidWorks, and Autodesk Inventor. Now that I’m getting into 3D printing, I’m coming back to CAD and finding my skills pretty rusty.
I plan to use FreeCAD as my main tool. Could anyone please recommend some tutorials that I can complete that would give me a solid working knowledge of FreeCAD and help me brush up on CAD in general?
To each their own, but I have been able to make FreeCAD do everything I needed it to do, sometimes at the beginning with a short trip to the forums or watching a youtube video. I didn’t have to lose any sleep over it. It wasn’t any different than learning any other piece of software.
I dabbled with several (pirated) commercial CAD packages in the late '90’s and early 2000’s and I honestly don’t find FreeCAD to be any more byzantine than any of those. I think the oft-repeated canard that “FreeCAD is impossible to use” is no longer based on reality.
The point is: With OnShape, I’m able to wing it. Scan something, load the STL, define a few planes throughout the whole thing, freehand a few lines, extrude, offset here and there for clearance, print, forget. With FreeCAD I need to do it correctly and, as I just need a physical thing, I just don’t have the patience to find out what correctly would mean.