Great question. In my personal opinion, I think you would be far better served learning one of the more contemporary CAD tools. But I definitely appreciate the attraction to a tool that your mouse-muscle-memory just knows instinctually. It is hard to break away. This coming from someone who had the friggen rug pulled out from them upon the release of Excel 2007 and had to relearn all the hotkeys. It really put a damper on my productivity for a while because I used to navigate the Excel keyboard like a piano virtuoso before Microsoft found a so-called ‘better way’… ■■■■ them!!!
When I got back into design I was even more out of date than you are now. My last experience was with AutoCAD Circa 1990(The developers of Sketchup) and Pro Engineer Circa 2000. So when I was looking around for a solution, I did look at Sketchup and about a dozen or so other CAD solutions. As you already know Sketchup is better suited for folks trying to show off building concepts to prospective clients.
After looking at all of the options. You really are left with three ‘dominant’ free ones. They are in no particular order:
- FreeCAD
- Fusion360
- Onshape
I would not recommend FreeCAD. In a word, it is just an absolute train wreck of an interface and as open-source, it’s written by committee and not to mention, the support community can be really unwelcoming… um… let’s call it what it is, they can be real assholes to anyone visiting their forum if you try to deviate from their perception of their canon.
Fusion360 is very powerful. There are a lot of fans. There is a free version too. Here is why that falls down to number 2 on my list though.
- They only allow 10 models at one time in their free version.
- They are owned by AutoCAD who has historically pulled the rug out from under its userbase by making what was once free and then charging you for it after you’ve made to much of an investment in time and energy. I consider AutoCAD to be to predatory to make a long term investment in.
OnShape has gotten my full endorsement however. It is was developed by ex-SolidWorks people. I was very leery of them at first because they were acquired by PTC which was the developer Pro Engineer and when I was a Pro-E customer, I hated them because the embodied the nickel and dime approach to bleeding their customer base. Its why my company at the time was forced to defect to SolidWorks who eventually kicked their ass in the marketplace. However, my fears of PTC taking free OnShape and doing an AutoCAD like greedy landgrab, are so far unfounded. Since they were acquired five years ago, PTC has left them alone.
Here are the advantages and disadvantage of OnShape
- unlimited number of models.
- The disadvantage is that everything you make is in the public domain unless you purchase the license. That’s not an issue for me but if you work on confidential stuff, that could be a problem.
- The second feature is both an advantage and disadvantage depending on your situation. They are a 100% Cloud based solution.
- The advantage to having the Cloud do the work, is that it doesn’t matter what kind of desktop hardware you have, they support Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Whereas with Fusion360, if you don’t have beefy hardware and decent graphics capability, you can quickly find yourself at the wrong end of the performance curve.
- The third aspect is a matter of opinion but between OnShape and Fusion360, I find OnShape the easier of the two to use.
The last point is one you may want to consider. Do a search on YouTube for CAD and 3D and see which one has more tutorials. I found that OnShape had far more tutorials and many more that lent themselves to 3D printing. This surprised me because even Josef Prusa promotes Fusion360 on his website. They have a book they publish both electronically and hard copy on the use of Fusion360 for 3D printing. It’s doubly surprising because Fusion360 has 3D printing hooks baked into it, that is until you try to use it and realize it’s just another greedy landgrab to use a service they promote.
If you want a good place to start, take a look at this video and also his tutorials are great place to start for 3D Printing enthusiasts interested in CAD.
He covers the following in his comparison
