Welding Tips and Tricks

Good Afternoon (ish), everyone. Since retiring, most of my welding has been of the "odds and ends" variety or artistic. I am wanting to design and build some custom wheelchairs and other adaptive equipment, as the stuff currently on the market mostly seems designed by able bodied persons. Everything I've built up til now has just been sketched on a notebook or with soapstone on a piece of scrap. I think I need to learn some basic CAD to use in my endeavors. Sorry for the long winded post..
I'm looking for recommendations as to which CAD program is easiest to learn. Also, being affordable would be a big plus.
Thanks.
-Eldon

Eldon,

I've never used it, but there is an open-source 3-D CAD program called avoCADo, found here:

http://avocado-cad.sourceforge.net/

Kinda like Firefox and OpenOffice... it doesn't get cheaper.

Steve S

Thanks Otto, I'll check that out. I do like open source stuff

Google Sketch Up is another free one. I've never used it so not sure about ease of use.

avoCADo is listed as pre-alpha and has not been updated in several years. I think I'll give sketchup a try and see if it meets my needs. I have zero CAD experience but I'll see how it goes. Thanks for the replies.
Cheers.
-Eldon

xwrench wrote:avoCADo is listed as pre-alpha and has not been updated in several years. I think I'll give sketchup a try and see if it meets my needs. I have zero CAD experience but I'll see how it goes. Thanks for the replies.
Cheers.
-Eldon

I'm spolied with over 17 years of AutoCAD training, but I've had buddies who can't draw a straight line with a ruler use sketch up...works pretty good.

I've been happy with DesignCAD 3D Max ... It's been easy to navigate and flexible for my needs.

I don't know if affordable applies, but I figure Solidworks to be the best. They offer student packages at a decent price. Like welding, takes practice but well worth the effort.

If you're retired, take some night college courses. I've been using AutoCAD for about 14 years now. You can go online and get a free student copy if you're learning. I have all kinds of parts plasma and laser cut all the time. Once you go that route, the possibilities are endless. Things fit together nicely and that makes for prime welding.

My vote is for MoI3D. It's a Nurbs modeller, just like Rhino. Which is no wonder, because the guy who stands behind MoI is the same guy who wrote Rhino in it's early days.

And on top of an affordable price and a very intuitive utilisation, you have a very, very, very helpful community to get you going. Just check out the MoI forum to see what I am talking about.

Ted