After downloading and installing, you’ll end up with a “start center” that looks something like this:įreeCAD is unique among 3D design programs in that it has many different workbenches, or modes, to draw and model in. It’s available for Windows, Linux, and OS X in 32 or 64-bit varieties.

To use FreeCAD, you might want to download FreeCAD. We won’t be copying this thing exactly – there’s a small taper on the tab with the counterbored hole – but we’ll get close enough so our finished model should be functionally equivalent. The tutorial for FreeCAD continues below.Īs with all tutorials, we’ll be copying this “thing”, taken from an 80-year-old textbook on drafting. Our in-house, overpaid SEO expert (he’s really just a monkey someone trained to use a bullwhip) demands I link to the previous ‘Making a Thing’ tutorials: Very powerful, very cool, and unlike a lot of CAD packages out there, free. Basically, you can think of this as a graphical extension of the Thingiverse Customizer. If you’re designing a thumbscrew and want the head larger while keeping the threads the same, FreeCAD is for you. If you need a bauble that’s three times the size of the original, FreeCAD’s parametric modeling makes it easy to scale it up. I don’t know if these suggestions reflect the popularity or difficulty of FreeCAD nevermind, it’s totally the difficulty.įreeCAD is an amazing tool that, if used correctly, can be used to make just about any part, and do it in a manufacturing context.

There is one constant in all those comment threads: FreeCAD. I’ve been writing these tutorials on making an object in popular 3D modeling programs for a while now, and each week I’ve put out a call for what software I should do next.

Freecad for beginners