Drawing board v CAD

Clive,

I think that there is a fundamental problem for many people that wish to get familiar with 3D CAD, and that is the lack of basic tutorials. If you are anything like me, who needs the manual!

However, this is one case where it pays dividends to get to grips with two things: One - the nomenclature - which may not be quite what you thought the words meant; and Two - the structure that the programmer expected you to put in place and follow during construction.

For F360 this is important, but contrary to the belief of some, it is entirely appropriate to start with a 2D sketch, the fag-packet equivalent. Indeed, in my case where I sometimes call upon 2D drawings made some time ago, I start by importing a dxf file.

It's not appropriate to try and do a tutorial session via the forum so I have sent you a private message.

Edited By Swarf Maker on 21/03/2018 00:17:05

See the 'training films' link here:

paulthecad.com/product-category/cad-training/

More details here:

paulthecad.com/product/turbocad-training-films-usb-drives/

Neil

For those looking for a printed manual for Fusion 360 the official one is here

It is written as a series of tutorials and has a useful list of keyboard shortcuts at the end. Be aware that; if you want to print it, it is about 200 pages.

Russell

3D CAD is a complex program to learn, much like learning a new language and the better CAD systems are difficult and time consuming for a new operator. Once learnt, would never go back to the manual method.

I have been a mechanical draftsmen (draftperson to be politically correct) for 35+ years. Starting work on a drawing board and then Autocad 2D. My introduction to 3D was Pro Engineer. Training for basic level operation took 1 week full time at a training centre. 3 or 4 weeks later I returned to the centre for another week of training for the advanced level modelling course. Then again later for an advanced drawing course. It was estimated that it would take 3 to 6 months for a compitent draftsman to be as efficient producing drawings than he had been doing them by hand. After this time it was far quicker to produce drawings than before. Especially if it was only to make midifications to and existing drawing. Modern CAD system are much more use friendly but still take a while to master.

Accurate dimensions on hand made drawings has to be calculated. Overall lengths of multiple parts had to be added together, sometimes with mistakes, To eliminate mistakes before production, the drawings were sent to a second person for checking. CAD drawings are extremely accurate and therefore often do not need to be checked for correct dimensions. The top line CAD systems can automaticall check for interference between parts. They can also calculate the mass and centre of gravity. Some also have finite element analysis modules to calculate stresses.

As projects get more complex there is a high risk of making mistakes. Parts which have to be modified or scrapped. The traction engine which I am building has many parts and everything is modelled on the computer before I commence machining and wasting time and money.

After the model is complete, assembly and individual part drawings can bequickly produced. Dimensions for parts can be automatically (or manually) added to the drawings. When any change to the model is made, all of the associated drawings are automatically updated. Even possible to change the model by changing dimensions on the drawings. Assembly drawings can be automatically populated with item numbers and a Bill of Materials.

I use Solidworks which has a sheetmetal module which can create layout drawings of bent plates in the flat state with position of the bend line for pressing.

Paul.

Nice work Paul!

Note that Fusion has most of those features too - sheet metal, FEA (stress, vibration, buckling, thermal, thermal stress, design optimisation etc), animation, rendering, surface modelling and of course full multi axis CAM. It's aimed at the same "mid-range" professional users as Solidworks and must be about 80% there now I'd guess. And free for amateur use.

SW costs an arm and ten legs - and they really don't like it if you refuse the annual "support" (another half dozen arms and legs per year), yet it is so bug-ridden that you need the support in my professional experience. It's that arrogance that Fusion and Onshape are cashing in on although to be fair it is at least relatively easy to learn and use. I enjoyed it but couldn't see any way to justify it for my own use. And then there would be a similar cost for the SW CAM plug-ins....

The more work I did in SW, the more uneasy I felt about whether I would be able to afford to access it in the future. Now everything is in Fusion and of course I can import most of my previous SW (and SE) works.

Murray

I'm still running an old version of SW on a 32 bit computer which is pushed to the limit sometimes. Have been building the engine for 5 years now and did not want to change software. Even though you can export/import to a different CAD system, there are always some things thet do not work properly. Like everyone else, I use what I know. Will have to try Fusion soon (still looking for a roundtuit). Although after you have masterred one system, it is normally easy to learn another. Most work in a similar way.

Paul.

Edited By Paul Lousick on 21/03/2018 12:32:25

Yes, for one thing you lose all the mates / joints when you import, so assemblies need to be put back together. In Fusion, you can use "as built" joints, so you don't have to move the parts to re-mate them but the whole mate / joint concept is different in both Fusion and Onshape to the way SW does them and takes a bit of getting used to.

My access to SW was either through spare licenses at work or using my kids' academic (12 month) licenses. But once those went away I was on my own and all my work compromised. I certainly wouldn't change horses mid project if I were you and still had a working SW license.

Murray

We're running SW2014 and refuse to shell out for the regular bug fixes. As Murray says, they cost an arm and several legs. We just get to know what the bugs are and find work-arounds for them. There are quite a few memory leaks in the version we have, but it's not as bad as the first version we used in anger (SW2006). After half a day's use it's often necessary to re-start the PC to get everything functioning properly again. Not terribly good practice in the programming to make that necessary, but it shows they have better error handling than I can manage to prevent the errors killing the program.

For home use, I doubt I'd find it worth the cost, and would try to go for F360 or similar.

Regards,

Richard.

It's ironic that their pricing policy actually rewards mediocre programming. By releasing crap code, users pretty much require the "support" to get new releases up and running, along with "updates" after each major release that patch up the crap code to make it almost workable. If they wrote and tested it properly in the first place, they wouldn't be able to force the "support" on you.

I really struggled with installation of the SW Student release a couple of years back. Obviously, the moment you told them you were talking about a Student license they would tell you there was no support (ie nothing in it for them). And having released it, if there were any issues it was just tough titty. Go sling your hook etc.

There's a lot of jargon used in software to make crap offerings sound almost professional. Our guys used to talk about various levels of "release candidates" before they got around to beta testing and finally more "release candidates" getting closer to the deadline, then follow up the actual release with bug fixes and updates. They would then evangelise about exciting new(?) concepts like scrum, "kanban" and "lean" as if they had some insight into development excellence, or had actually invented the words. With hardware, once it's shipped, re-releases become somewhat more tricky, as you don't have the luxury of endlessly throwing it at the wall until it sticks.

Murray

I know exactly where Murray is coming from with regard to drawings trapped on an unaffordable program or an old, obsolete one. I have a 13 year stash in VectorWorks Mechanical (as was) and the prospect of £1,000 for an update when Apple OS updates break the program is less than appealing. Especially as the mechanical side has been abandoned and hasn't been updated in ages. Fortunately its a pretty complete package for 2D. Never tried the 3D side. Probably great at 2 1/2 D for simple CNC. I use Superduper clones as my back-up system so, if worst comes to worst, I can always clone off a working OS - program pair and use that. On another machine if need be. Scary when replicating hardware is cheaper than updating. There is a 20 year pile in MacDraw too which was my CAD program for far too long. Less than ideal but I knew how to drive it. Less said about the TurboCAD Mac / TurboCAD Mac Pro ones the better. Just started to get my head round it when IMSI canned it.

I suspect that a major issue for folk like us when approaching Fusion 360 is that we are used to learning just enough to get todays job done. Every time we hit something new we make like riki-tikki-tava and run and find out how. Which steadily builds into a good stack of knowledge for doing what we do but leaves huge gaps covering things we haven't yet done. Fusion 360 isn't really geared to that sort of approach.

The official tutorial based handbook in Russells link is quite good. Came out a bit wishy washy on my Brother printer tho'. I always put such pages in clear loose leaf pockets rather than simply punching them. Boxed packs of 100 or 200 can be found for £ very reasonable mail order. Maybe less than 1/5 th of price for shop bought brands, e.g. Rexel et al. Means you don't tear out the holes in the aper and, if its a car manual or similar, proof against greasy fingers. But its no substitute for proper, indexed manual when you want to know how to use that command you can't get to work as it ought or even find the function that you are certain is in there somewhere. VectorWorks help is moderately good but I still sometimes find myself faking through the manual until a possibly relevant picture pops up giving clue to roughly where things are. Can't do that in a help file search. Often serendipitously productive when I find something I didn't know VectorWorks could do. Usually about 5 years after it would first have been handy.

Clive

Got a classic case of that with the payroll/purchasing/MRP software where I work. It's 'Epicore'. The software is provided 'free', they make their money in consulting & programming fees to 'customise' it for you. It's a license to print money. They provide a default template invoice where the user can put in their own address etc. The default template does not include VAT. So Epicore are called in to add a VAT field, and lo & behold it costs around £1k to add at their £200-ish/hr rate. Multiply that by every customer who needs to charge VAT (ie every customer big enough to need an MRP system) and suddenly the rewards for bad programming are astonishingly lucrative. It's years past the point when it would have been cheaper for me to programme the MRP system from scratch. (And further more the data files would have been in ASCII so if there's a muddle, it could have been rescued manually rather than the binary used for the current system).

With the old 'NISA' FEA system there was a £1600 'support' fee which included an update every year. I noticed that bug fixes introduced in year 2 to correct problems in year 1 software were removed in year 3 and put back in year 4. What finally did it for us was the Y2k kerfuffle. They had hard coded the year as 19xx in the output files & never bothered to fix it even despite the 'End of the World, all computers will die' Y2K moral panic that happened in 1999. At this point we went back to the last stable version we had and invited NISA to get lost. I ended up writing my own 3D modeller that enabled models to be created quicker than with the modeller supplied with NISA at the time ( **LINK**  and for a while it kept our usage of NISA competitive for FEA consulting work.

Regards,

Richard.

Richard - wow that was quite a job! Looks pretty capable but clearly must have taken some significant effort. For reference, it seems that Autodesk use Nastran in their FEA offering. Seems to work very nicely on the occasions I've used it.

There's also a bit of a parallel (in my eyes) with the general consumer quality culture and legislation in the States. There they still have that "12 month warranty" concept (remember when we did that?), after which you can go whistle. And worse than that, the moment you walk out of the shop with a purchase, the retailer has no further obligation to you in terms of issues with the product. It is now down to you to contact the manufacturer and fight it out with them. Of course this generally means dealing with a company half way across the continent and requiring their agreement (by deigning to issue an "RMA" number to you) before you can send stuff back to them - obviously a lot of people give up at that stage. I can't help thinking this is one reason there is so much crap on sale over there and many of the local products are so unreliable. Product names tend to include things like "dura", "pro", "reli-" etc and they may offer a more expensive "pro" version that claims better life. They also don't have the same ideas when it comes to advertising standards. So you find that the vast majority of black tea on sale there claims to be "orange pekoe" (ie the very best quality - when clearly it is actually sweepings and tailings) and you can buy "100% real Parmesan cheese" that is made in the US (go figure). God help us all if the idiot Fox manages to open the door to shiploads of their crap assailing our markets....

Murray

I use Solidworks and have for a long time. For simple items it would be quite easy for a beginner to learn. For more difficult pieces and assembly, and for complex shapes it is a different story. There is no way I would go back to a drawing board, and the ability to rotate/slice/colour/change etc your model and produce traditional orthographic 2D instantly with a CAD package and produce STL files for 3D printing, etc makes CAD essential. I don't think the drawing board is used at all now in industry (or what's left of it!).

Companies used to employ vast warehouses (DOs) full of draughtsmen. Nowadays the same work can be done by a small handful of CAD jockeys. Many of today's mechies seem to have very little experience beyond the office but there again, I recall quite a few of the draughtsmen had a chip on the shoulder so were a PITA to deal with. Being a graduate, hands-on and handy with technical drawing didn't always go down too well. Mind you, when I started working in the mid eighties, we were still sending silly paper memos to people in the next room and computers were seen as a silly distraction apart from use for PCB layout. Thank god things have moved on.

Murray

Just tried to download a copy of Fusion to try but could only find 64 bit version.

Is it available for 32 bit ?

Paul.

As a Fusion 360 novice I should not be surprised to be corrected but I understand the current program is 64 bit only.

I'm pretty sure that is correct - 64-bit only. It's fairly CPU-intensive to do the kinds of graphics things it does, and probably needs the CPU grunt to do it quickly enough.

I was quite good at 2D stuff at school but I find that 3D takes you to a whole new level when things start to get a bit more complicated and you add in a few mating parts

3D CAD panning allows you to visualise and sort any issues before you actually even build the part

I'd love to have more time to learn it and use it competently but its still a to-do subject until more time is available

So far as I can see this is a genuinely new piece of software so it is understandable that it was written for current machines including, as it is cloud-based, mobile devices (this seems to imply that modern phones are 64 bit, too).

Incidentally, there is a good deal of fascinating Autodesk history at fourmilab.ch but it predates Fusion.

My dad was a draftsman who decided to retire rather than learn CAD; he may have lost a few years earnings from that. I liked tech drawing at school but never had to use it afterwards.

I had to learn 2D CAD when people started asking me to draw parts they wanted laser cut. I'm a 'computer person' so surely it would be easy for me :-\ I don't enjoy 2D CAD.

With enforced workshop downtime I have decided to use it to learn Fusion360. As Neil said 3D modelling is really about extruding 2D profiles to get some initial shapes and then adding/subtracting other solids to get what you want. Completely different to 2D drawing. I'm getting used to it having spent at least an hour most days since Easter mucking around with it. I haven't learned how to turn my models into workshop drawings yet but I know the product can do it and that will be useful.

The product is so complex I have very little chance of working it out on my own but searching for YouTube videos will usually find an explanation.

To give my learning some focus I am trying to design a 1/32 scale model of an 0-6-0 tank engine, and the next few parts I need to make for my 5" gauge project. The 3D model gives a lot of immediate and obvious highlighting of problems such as interference, and the 'parametric' part means you can often change one of the 2D profiles you've used to define a part and switch back the model and see the impact immediately. I cannot imagine a drawing board or 2D CAD program giving the same amount of help - you'd need years of experience visualising things in your head to get anywhere near it.

My dad was a diesel mechanic, then a fitter and turner before he decided he wanted to work in a clean office and got an engineering certificate and started drafting. He told me the guys who didn't have the background of actually building things were often sending drawings to the workshop for parts that either couldn't be built or didn't fit where they needed to go.