I love it when I have a problem and I can just go fix that with an hour of designing and testing and have a working solution printed for the next day. Just so satisfying. This is why I love this hobby.
I love it when I have a problem and I can just go fix that with an hour of designing and testing and have a working solution printed for the next day. Just so satisfying. This is why I love this hobby.
I feel like this is the next step for me on my 3d-printing journey, but I have 0 experience with CAD. How do you design parts like this? (Note - I’ve done 0 research). Is there a how-to-for-dummies you can point me towards?
If you are a complete noob then I will highly recommend Tinkercad made by Autodesk. It runs in your browser and is free to use. It’s solid modeling meaning you get cubes, spheres, pyramids etc that you can add and subtract from eachother to get to your final part. It’s a good intuitive start for beginners. If you have any knowledge of programming or is mathematical minded you could try OpenScad that is a text based modeling where you write what you want in terms of cubes spheres etc. I would not recommend FreeCad since it’s very difficult and complex and has a confusing interface.
Love the “handwriting” tool that is on Tinkercad. Allows me to sign my prints before giving them out
Thanks, that gives me a starting point, which is what I needed!
FreeCAD is not intuitive at all. I’ve used Fusion 360 for years, and used SolidWorks in college, and I have a mechanical engineering degree. Trying FreeCAD felt like going from a reliable car to a beater that you have to jimmy the key in to get it to start, and smack it in just the right spot every couple minutes to keep it running.
It’s a cool idea, and I like that it’s open source, but it’s just too clunky for me. I had high hopes for it to replace Fusion with Autodesk restricting free access so much this year, but looks like I’ll just have to deal with Fusion for now