Fusion 360 Free version - work arounds

[Andrewg]

SOLIDWORKS is certainly a leader in mech eng design, and having a cheaper, more secure way to access a personal licence (I believe for some years you could get cheap licences by joining a model engineering society) will be reassuring to those who can use it......But you can't beat free, and at least for now Fusion 360 is still free with all that professional, parametric, constraint based, integrated CAM goodness....if you can navigate around the recently imposed restrictions.

SketchUp is a fantastic tool for designing rectilinear woodworking projects, but does not handle curves well and the short comings of the models it produces can be a liability when you move to CAM.

So with workarounds, Fusion 360 is still a compelling option in the short term, but FreeCAD now seems a safer choice where you needa simple parametric model to drive part design for CNC.

[cropwell]

SketchUp is a fantastic tool for designing rectilinear woodworking projects, but does not handle curves well and the short comings of the models it produces can be a liability when you move to CAM.

My gamechanger with Sketchup was that I could not get a .stl export feature, when I moved to a new Ms account. It wasn't worth the bother of registering with Trimble as SketchUp Make is crude and clunky (crap!).