Best Easy CAD???? Your Favorite?

[Matt_in_Brooklyn]

Obviously, you would want to use a mouse with Sketchup. If you have one with a wheel like most of them do, panning, zooming and rotating is very easy once you get used to it. Zooming by rolling the mouse wheel in or out. Rotate the drawing by holding the wheel down while moving the mouse. And pan by holding down the shift key and wheel at the same time. The shift and ctrl keys are essential to Sketchup.

I did not know that about the shift and ctrl keys. I was wondering why such a cool program was giving me so much trouble; couldn't be my fault...

P.I.C.N.I.C. - Problem In Chair, Not In Computer!

Matt.

[NoogaD]

Matt, I think I discovered that scrolling bit by accident. It frustrated me a lot to have to click the rotate button, then pan, then zoom. Divine intervention or something like that. You can also use the shift to constrain a line. Like when you are drawing something that you want to intersect a different point but you are having trouble getting it to stay on an axis or parallel line. Just find the line, hold shift (you should see the line you are drawing get bold,) then drag to where you want to intersect.

I wish Sketchup had a fillet button. Like Solidworks, you pick the two intersecting lines (or better yet, surfaces) you want to fillet, hit the button and then specify the radius. Easy. Sketchup, you have to know where your fillet radius is going to hit so that you can draw a tangent arc from those two points. Then you have to extrude the fillet along the surface. You can do it, but it's a bit of a challenge. Same with array procedures. You have to copy an item, place it in the end point of the array and then tell it how many times to copy the item, whereas SW it's all in one step.

I'm not sure about the other programs mentioned: Turbo CAD, etc. I tried one of those $99 jobs before using Sketchup and was completely unsatisfied.

[alanrockwood]

Years ago I took a class and mastered (well, sort of) Autocad. It was a tough one. I used it somewhat, but never enough to really get proficient. I had a student version back then and then found it subject to changing computers, planned obsolescence, etc. Pretty soon it was gone.

I picked up autodesk later and used it for a while. Time went by and now I am trying to find an inexpensive, easy to use, CAD program, knowing beyond the basic framework I will need to learn new interfaces and commands

I see guys online doing impressive drawings. So, let me know what your favorite is.

Thanks in advance.

Jim

Consider DoubleCad. There is a free version available.

[lens42]

One thing that really helped me with Sketchup was YouTube. I would type in bits of questions like "Sketchup dimension drawings" into YouTube search. It's a much faster path to a usable answer than a regular Google search.