The Steamboating Forum

As I am away from my shop wintering in Mexico, I thought I would teach myself CAD.
I have a Plasmacam and have some design knowledge from that and use it for most design work in the shop. It is easy to use and difficult to annotate and print.
So I bought a copy of DeltaCAD and tried to learn it. After a couple of days spending more time reading the Help than drawing, I realized that I was drawing in mud with a broken tree limb.
So.
I did not give up, I went and did a search for "the easiest CAD program to learn" and came up with IronCAD 2014 Suite. WOW! Super program, had me modeling in 3D in no time and the support was awesome. The company emailed a link for their training videos, the Canadian rep offered telephone assistance and video conferencing support.
Now this is a 30 day free trial....... After a few hours and drawing Barts Crank as a lesson, I began to worry that I liked it too much, and I could not find a price on the Ironworks Website without giving them a pile of information, so began a search. Finding the price was like trying to find 0bama's birth certificate, and took a day of intermittent searches til a Canadian dealer spilled the beans in the metadata. $5115CDN or about 4500US
So I have to delete that for sure.

Back to the drawing board(Amish CAD) and I did one more search for CAD under $500 and came up with this for FREE.
This is a full featured really nice program about 2.4GB in size and from first startup to a complete drawing of Barts Crank in 30 minutes. And no, I am not an experienced draftsman.
Here is the link, and what can it hurt to use it for free?
https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/ ... ge/free2d/

So far this beats DeltaCAD and TurboCAD to death with a muddy stick.

Your link doesn't lead to anything in the US.

- Bart

barts wrote:Your link doesn't lead to anything in the US.

- Bart

How very odd. I've never heard of that....they must be watching you guys.
Seimens is a huge multinational with one of those world maps to click on where you are to get the site in your language.
Main website is siemens.com/entry/cc/en/

OK I found it.
As you guys are so touchy. ..this should work, it is off the US site:
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/e ... ndex.shtml
I wonder if this version for the US includes metric?
If this doesn't work...I'm completely buggered. Maybe search for "Seimens Free 2D in US" which is how I got it.
The rest of the English speaking world can use the other one

Anyhow, it's a rainy day in paradise so I am drawing on it, and I am getting to love this thing more all the time.

Hi Ironman

That sounds very interesting. Certainly worth a look as Siemens are a pretty sound engineering company. Just too bad that I have spent quite a bit of cash upgrading from TurboCAD 2D to TC 3D. The trouble is that I don't seem to find the time to use/learn it just at the moment.

As for your link's failure for Bart, I suspect that is probably down to an ISP somewhere in the trail. Last year the guys hosting Beckmann's Boatshop blocked any search from outside the US as a potential threat. They have since been persuaded that is not a good idea. It may be that Bart's ISP has a block on European sites.

Regards

Pete

Huh, it came up on my comp!

and whatever was wrong has bee fixed, at least when I use work's proxies

Steamboats are a lot easier to debug than worldwide computer systems

- Bart