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Looking for Workbench Design SW :: $10 bounty for 1st accepted answer

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Attronarch:
DraftSight is 2D CAD.

@Renegade You also have the option of extracting the parts you need from the toolbox, by creating them as parts and exporting to STEP or IGES format. Both of those should be readable by any 3D CAD software. Then you could use them in your 3D CAD software of choice to assemble what you wish. But this is just a crude work-around, and by no means should be used as long-term solution.

Renegade:
UPDATE

Well, everything seemed to either be out of the price range or suck. Even those out of the price range seemed to suck for what I wanted.

So... with things as they are, I've decided to stick a high powered rifle (called SketchUp) in my mouth and pull the trigger.

CAD is so entirely alienated from actual normal human experience. It's stunning that there's nothing out there that lets you work in a normal human fashion. I'd have thought that something was there, but no... The market is all professional with nothing meeting the needs of the consumer market for simple design.

As for SketchUp, it is highly non-intuitive and definitely not something that you can just "use" out of the box. It requires significant effort. Sigh... Not something I wanted to put on my plate at the moment, but I'll just have to suck it up and pull that trigger.

Attronarch:
In that case you are better off with something like Autodesk Inventor: http://www.autodesk.com/education/free-software/inventor-professional

You can get it for free with non-commercial educational licence. Pick your country and either IT admin or mentor and you are good to go.

Besides being easy to use you'll also get the benefit of huge toolbox (be sure to check ANSI, ISO and DIN standards), and a suite in which you can make 3D model and then easily translate it into 2D technical drawing.

There are good 2D CAD packages, as I've mentioned before, but I haven't found really good, user friendly, and free 3D CAD package.

The problem with 3D CAD is that it is basically the same set of features regardless of what are you designing. All big 3D CAD software packages haven't really improved on that, but rather by adding new features, fancier GUIs, etc.

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