A CAD Program

Alibre Design Xpress 3D.

A real 3D solid modeling package. Works great. Free.

Discussion forums:

Alibre, a 3d parametric modeler, gets good reviews considering its price. As I understand it, the main limitation on the free version is that there's a limit to the number of parts in an assembly. One workaround to this limitation would be to lump several parts into one. You wouldn't want to do this if you had to produce part drawings of your model for release, but it'd probably be workable for drawings for your own use.

Ned Simmons

AutoSketch has been an incredibly capable 2D program. I would advise nothing older than version 7 though. You can pick up new copies of the older program pretty cheap online with a little searching.

If you want something really inexpensive and easy, use A9Cad for free, or upgrade for like $29. I do not use it personally, but have reviewed it a while back. They seem to have a good thing going there, and they offer some very nice DXF to DWG conversion tools as well. You can find that here:

Grummy

I suspect you don't have enough disk space for a cache or enough memory to run it. Maybe you have to much already loaded.

I"ve been using turbocad for years - since DOS - and it works. Something isn't set up right. C out of space ? - make a area on another drive/partition.

Martin Martin Eastburn @ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net NRA LOH & Endowment Member NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder

Tim Wescott wrote:

TurboCad and it's offshoots of AutoCad are all stable, BUT, the learning curve extends from day one to eternity. Telling it the wrong thing will crash it, I have Intellicad, same thing, different wrapper. GIve it a bad instruction and watch several hours of work evaporate. Good for geeks, not so good if you want to get something done.

Draft Choice from Trius Software, I've been using it for years, simple, intuitive, you can use math inputs, or work from the mouse or graph tablet. Not free, and not cheap, about $70 last time I looked. trial can be downloaded, it puts a ghost right in the middle of the drawing until the trial period expires, then it ain't a ghost, solid black.

Rich

Tim: If you want to be able to scan a sketch, then have the CAD program convert it into a drawing- you need something with "raster-to-vector" conversion, which later versions of Turbocad do have. (My brother bought a fairly recent version of Turbocad for $18 at the local computer swapmeet!) I use Autocad and Vector, but they're not cheap, and they don't do R to V conversion. One of the places I work bought a program called Streamline specifically to perform R to V conversions, $1500, but if Turbocad does a decent job, it's gotta be the obvious choice. -Paul

P.S. do you empty your wastebasket very often?

Tim Wescott wrote:

Turbocad is reliable - dunno why it pasted your machine., But I use Corel draw - get a bitmap editor and enough to do decals thrown in.

I'll also recommend that you take a look at Alibre Express. I've been using one of the commercial versions of Alibre (Alibre Pro) for a couple of years now and was really surprised at how easy it was to learn. I'm entirely self-taught when it comes to CAD and it took me about a week with the tutorials to get productive. I never could make sense out of IntelliCAD or DesignCAD. The most complicated project I've completed so far is a copy of Jerry Howell's design for his V-Twin model IC engine, renderings of which can be seen here:

Unfortunately I don't think that Alibre can import scanned images into part design, though they can be inserted into drawings, not that that would do you much good..

Mike

Thx for the tip, I'm dowloading it now (67 MB).

TurboCad has proven it self, many modellers use it. It may not be th

best but it surely isn't the worst (specially for the price). Go t overstock.com and pick up the latest version for about $20 and if you system needs upgrade you can do that there as well. Save your self th time to re-learn a new CAD software (learning curve on these is neve ending). Some times our brand new 2years old computer is alread obsolete for the latest version of software (not that your system i not up to date):

-- habutt

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$90 for one of the easiest to use, and most complete packages available Design CAD version 16.

To the OP, there is a version of this program called Model CAD. (if you can find it?) It is specifically set up to design model airplanes (and is pretty handy for real ones too).

Richard some of my daydream sketches:

That free version has some limitations but the "real" version is priced (if memory serves) at about $1000. Pretty easy to work with as well.

Why do you say that?

Peter

Can't speak for Peter, but... After buying two versions of TurboCAD(admittedly from the bargain bin) and confronting the daunting learning curve, I have given up on both. I'm looking at Alibre & A9CAD from the suggestions here.

Tim,

If 2D is good enough, look at QCad. It's not perfect, but it is reasonably priced on Win32 (free on Linux IIRC), has a common sense license, etc.

Bill

I recently used CadStd. Lite version is free, Pro version is $25. I've been told all CAD programs are a pain to learn. I was frustrated getting started, mostly because I didn't want to learn, just use it. After I gave that up and just started playing with it. You get the feel for it in a few days.

A friend was telling me horror stories how Turbocad put columns in the pool outside.

Wayne D.

Well, for under a hundred bucks (seen Lite closer to $50), Design Cad does 2D drating great, but also provides a migration path to 3D.

I use DC2000. The current version is 16? Have DC-DOS zipped up somewhere.

Simple interface, powerful stuff. It's a cool tool.

Richard

"CAD and Spread Sheet - tools of creation"

There is a bit of a learning curve to TurboCAD, however that seems to be the case with any CAD package that is not optimized for a specific use.

In the case of TurboCAD the comparison is to Floorplan3D (bundled with TurboCAD BTW). For doing 3D house layouts Floorplan3D is very fast and easy vs. doing the same in TurboCAD. TurboCAD provides far more capabilities at the cost of more complexity.

I've been using TurboCAD intermittently since ~1997 or so when I started out needing a 2D CAD package to view and tweak some architectural prints. I found the 2D version of TurboCAD as a free download from IMSI (just register) and found it fairly easy to get a handle on and use for my needs.

A few months after getting the 2D version I got the email offer for TurboCAD Pro 3D (v6 I think) for $99 which was rather a no-brainer. A few upgrades later and I'm currently using v9 pro at far less than the "regular" price.

I'm certainly still no CAD wiz, but I'm getting more comfortable with each project I work on. I have not really spent any time just trying to learn TurboCAD either. I'm also not running it on a particularly high end machine, just a P3/500 with 128MB and W2K and it runs just fine, in fact much better than Photoshop Elements 2 does.

Just my thoughts and experiences...

Pete C.