Anyone using Solidworks for knifemaking??

Thanks for the CAM info, it's always interesting to see what people use.

The reason few knifemakers use Solid Works is that it costs around $10-15k to buy the software plus the maintenance and for making custom knives... well. that's a lot of knives to sell every month just to pay for the CAD software. Not to mention the learning curve for SW is steep.

SW is also overkill for knifemaking. I have a friend who uses it at work to design complicated robot production machinery for industry... and the profits are in a whole nother ballpark. As is moldmaking for industry.

To do a knife, 2D CAD is really enough for almost all applications. Alibre and Rhino CAD are two 3D CAD programs which are pretty good and certainly enough for knifemaking type stuff. Both are also under $2k, Rhino is under $1k and both can output IGES files for 3D CAM.
 
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