Fantastic (and Free!) 2D Drawing Software

[jonny round boy]

I drew some templates up yesterday on SketchUp, with the intention of printing them out & sticking them to MDF to cut them out. For some reason though no matter what I did, I couldn't get SketchUp to accurately print out at 1:1 scale.

I searched the 'net, and found various posts about this issue, but gave up in the end. Whilst searching, I found a drawing program I'd not heard of before, called DraftSight.

It operates on the cartesian co-ordinate system, so it's more like 'proper' CAD programs in that respect, but it's purely 2D. Printing to exact scale is a doddle with this program! If you want to produce accurate physical templates from a CAD drawing, this is a great program.

Just thought I'd share. It's completely free to download and use, but activation is via e-mail so you do need to give a valid e-mail address.

Jonathan

 

[mattfc]

Thanks will look into that one, I know Daussault software from their Soildworks and Catia packages, both mega bucks, think the A380 was designed with the latter

 

[grbmds]

DeltaCad is a great 2D program and extremely easy to use. It is cheap by not free. Printing from Sketchup has always been a problem which seems to be the only reason to pay for Pro.

 

[briankb]

Thanks! I was just about to make my own templates but I'm glad I searched FOG first.

Draftsight is a good 2D CAD but there is another one from Siemens who makes SolidEdge ST6

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/velocity/solidedge/free2d/

If you are a student or teacher you can download a copy for non-commercial use of SolidEdge ST6 here http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/academic/resources/solid-edge/index.shtml

I believe the commercial licenses for SolidEdge are a little more affordable than SolidWorks and easier to obtain.

I started out last year using SolidWorks but a few months ago I tried SolidEdge ST5 and really liked the interface (synchronous) and a lot of it made more sense to me than the more traditional history based technique used with solidworks. You can use either method in SolidEdge.