CAD software?

What are some affordable CAD packages suitable for what we do?

[RTPBurnsville]

Check out Solid Edge 2D.... It's a free professional quality program from Siemens.

[John Stevenson]

This comes up every 3 months and there is no answer as it depends on what you want to do , whether program A suits better than program B, learning curve, if you need 2D or 3D, whether you can get your head round working in 3D [ some can't] and the price of kippers.

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[Ken_Shea]

I have but never used, Alibre so I cannot speak for it's ease of use, but it is suitable for 2D and 3D. Some outstanding models are shown on their site. The reason Alibre was not used is I opted for a CAD / CAM package, however it looks like they now have their own CAD/CAM package,

You can see it here, and believe they still offer the free Alibre Express version, fully functional however limited.

http://www.alibre.com/

[Bmyers]

For general drawing it is hard to beat QCad
http://www.ribbonsoft.com/qcad.html

[ptjw7uk]

As they say it depends on what you want to do.
Personally if you want to do it semi professioanlly then I would go for Autocad lite as that will do most of what you want and then if you want to go the whole hog get the 3d Autocad if you can afford it but for most things the lite version is addequate.

peter

[ptjw7uk]

Thought I would look at the Solid Edge 2D as its free but oh boy is their server slow slow slow 2hrs on braodband its as slow as dial up.
Unless everyone is going to try it!

Peter

[Norman Atkinson]

Peter,
It was I(eye), tite fisted oick that I am.

Now it is like a dog chasing a car. What does it do with it when it is caught?

Surprisingly, I couldn't get it loaded on my old 'puter' with Vista but the new one -on Vista, went in, in few minutes.

Norman

[Allan Waterfall]

I had no experience of CAD,either 2D or 3D and installed the SolidEdge 2D package.
For what I use it for it's ideal and fairly intuitive to use,it's also updated fairly often and the updates are also free.It also has a support newsgroup which is handy.

I quite like it anyway.

Allan

[BillH]

SolidWorks, ask the kid next door where to find it.