this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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As a user of FreeCAD and someone who made a living using CAD software, FreeCAD ain't it for the 'real world' yet. But I do have hopes that someday it might be.
I wholeheartedly agree with this tbh. Love FreeCAD for my 3D printing stuff, pretty much use it daily, however compared to something like Solidworks or AutoCAD it would be torture IMO to willingly chose FreeCAD for a complex real world product.
The biggest roadblock for FreeCAD right now is that is isn't that forgiving, you often have to go into a "technical" way of thinking to work around its quirks. The reality is, designers want to design, not become technical experts at navigating FreeCAD.
Even something like creating a thread shouldn't be as involved as FreeCAD makes it - once you get used to it it's OK, but in other CAD solutions it's often as simple as clicking a hole and choosing a thread creation tool...
Well, threads are actually quite easy to create in FreeCAD these days. Unless you need some kind of specialty thread, like say a light bulb thread or British ME, (Model Engineer), thread.
The Hole tool is merely point and select the thread you want - your choice of modeled or not. Plus you can do countersinks and counterbores from the same tool. The Thread Profile workbench makes external and internal threads fast and easy. Make your choice of thread - vee, buttress, or ACME/Trapazoidal and three clicks later you got a thread. The Fasteners workbench will also let you create threads easily too. Gears and springs have become simple to make with no real modeling required anymore. I've been trying out the Sheet metal workbench lately also. Not very full featured yet, but it does the basics pretty well so far. So lots of quality of life improvements have been making their way into FreeCAD since 0.17.
Where FreeCAD fails, (beside the TPN issue), is in the somewhat slower basic work flow. But, with customization, it can get pretty close to being fairly fast. But most users are casual users and don't dig into settings very much. But the biggest issue is the lack of a decent single robust and integrated Assembly workbench. I can design parts all day long, but unless I can easily put them all together to see if and how they all work together, it makes FreeCAD a no-go for commercial work. I can't even really design a model steam engine and assemble all the parts very easily.
Now, Ondsell is working on a unifying assembly workbench that I have very high hopes for, but it's not there yet. They do have a ways to go still.