DesignSpark Mechanical, a great CAD drawing tool !

I wanted to share with you my yesterday finding. Lots of modelers are equiped with 3D printer which are becoming a must-have for us as soon as you are able to design and draw your own parts.

Up to now, as a beginner, I was using Freecad as a CAD drawing tool to produce my STL files. My problem with freecad is that it has bugs and weird behaviour that are often unexplained. This stopped me few days ago while progressing on the Shinto Electro servo tray. Maybe it was the time to find another tool, which I did !!!

There are many cad softwares on the market, some are very expensive, some are online, eventually free, but usually limited. By chance I think I found the prefect software for my need to design, draw parts.

The name of this freeware is "DesignSpark Mechanical" and is kindly offered by RS-online. There are variants for electronic, PCB, electrical, and mechanical design? This is that latest version that I instal. The interface is very nice with smooth operations. The display is very readable in both 3D or 2D sketching. There are few but powerfull tools that allow to sketch complex parts. It can export the file in different format including STL.

Of course, as any software, there is a learning curve, but which can be shortened by watching at the very nicely made tutorial videos. This is allow you to understand better the concept

Overall, my first feeling is that this is a software/interface accessible to everyone and it seems to do the job very nicely and efficiently ... for free !

The following video will give you an overview and a pretty good idea about what is possible and how good and intuitive is this software:

Hope you will enjoy it the same I enjoy it since I discovered it !