CAD recommendations

Atlas Knife Company

Atlas Knife Company

Joined
Feb 16, 2010
Messages
3,668
I suck at drawing. So, can someone recommend a good free simple CAD program for laying out the knives in? I have an 11x17 printer so I would like to be able to print from it also. I have used RoboCAD(Apple ][) and cadvance before, as well as Lightwave 3D, so learning it shouldn't be too tough.

:jerkit:
 
It is my opinion that drawing programs like Adobe Illustrator do a better job for things like knife design. You have to be pretty darn experienced to generate good designs in most CAD systems. Otherwise they frequently look clunky and artificial.

my .02...
 
Nathan, I like the ability to layout dimensions in cad programs. And the drawing is a guideline so it gets de-artificialized :D between the printed page and the actual profiling. For me anyway. I like AutoCad myself.
 
Patrice Lemée;8066433 said:
Nathan, I like the ability to layout dimensions in cad programs. And the drawing is a guideline so it gets de-artificialized :D between the printed page and the actual profiling. For me anyway. I like AutoCad myself.
Click to expand...

"De-artificialized" That's a great word there.

A CAD program that can use things like NURB splines in a relatively freehand manner over a scanned in sketch is the best approach. Programs such as Unigraphics, Pro/ENGINEER and Catia have this. I love the ISDX inside of Pro/E. SolidWorks and AutoCAD may have added it too. I'm not aware of any inexpensive program that does this.
 
I have used turbocad for quite a while and it is easier than Autocad, I have autocad lite for the office to be compatible with others. Turbo cad allows you to set up a page the size to fit your printer with a grid, from that its pretty easy to draw a knife. The only problem with cad is you have to use a shape such as a circle or square ect to make all the forms, unlike a drawing program. But you can make it bigger and smaller using the scale.
 
I like Graphite. Not free, but you can get a free demo. Mac friendly.

Its the only CAD program (that I know of) that lets you define keyboard or mouse shortcuts for ANY tool, process, task, etc.

You can import a PIC file and trace over it as Nathan described; then you can go back and manipulate the curve's control points.
 
I tried using Google SketchUp for a while but went back to using a graphics program that let me use Bezier curves. GIMP would work and it's free.
 
Perhaps you could try Inkscape. It's sort-of the vector-based counterpart of the GIMP, being open source and multi-platform. Haven't used it for knives myself though, I use pen and paper or Unigraphics (NX3) for that.

Cheers Rody
 
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