I thought I would knock some dust off my drafting skills after a small chat with @[email protected]
Seeing this image on the tutorial made me realize, FreeCAD seems to be a Technical Geometry Super-Suite. It makes sense that CAD would grow to include all of these things. But I thought sharing the initial perspective of some one who hasn’t looked at this stuff in about 18 years might be interesting.
Granted I’m not actually familiar with most of this stuff, and none of it from the POV of FreeCAD. If this can deliver 10% of what I’m looking at, I’m in for a treat.
If you don’t want to make parametric models, you can build simpler things by combining primitive shapes in the FreeCAD part workbench. You can even fillet and chamfer them.
Mind. Blown. I had honestly not thought of that possibility. And you say fillets work? Wow, have to try that. Thanks!
I have found one issue with FreeCAD fillets: it doesn’t like it if they touch, that is…draw a rectangle with thickness of 10mm, and then apply a fillet around the top and bottom surfaces of 5mm radius, which would produce a perfect 10mm diameter. It doesn’t like doing that. 4.99 will work, but not 5.00. If you want a perfect half circle on the edge of something like that, you have to draw that another way.
The dirty secret of FreeCAD is that most drawings that look okay will extrude even if unconstrained. You just lose the ability to leverage the history tree and the model will be as brittle as any direct modeler’s.
FreeCAD is on its way, it’s attracting a little more money and attention, and I’m using it more and more, but I often still feel like I’m fighting it.