Remember learning to tie your shoes or ride a bike? Like many things, that’s easy once you know how to do it, but seems impossible before you learn. [NovaSpirit] asserts that Freecad is simple, and provides a simple walkthrough to create a part in the video below.
If this were riding a bike, this tutorial would be akin to watching someone ride a bike to pick up tips. You’d probably still want to have someone explain details to you before you attempt it yourself.
Freecad’s constraint system can be confusing, and [NovaSpirit] deliberately sticks to very simple ways to use it. However, once you get your feet wet, you’ll want to explore more sophisticated constraints. For example, instead of just plugging in measurements for how far away things are from the center is a problem if the size of the part ever changes since you have to remember to change it everywhere. With proper constraints, you would simply adjust the size of the part, and everything would move to the proper place.
Because he sticks to simple constraints, he also doesn’t show construction geometries. However, he shows how to incorporate external geometries when working with multiple sketches.
Is this the only FreeCAD tutorial you’ll ever need? No. It might not even be the first one you should try. But it is a look over the shoulder of someone making a practical design using simple methods that are perfectly fine for most simple designs.
If you want a longer series, we’ve looked at a few. If you want to take a step further into parameters, we’d suggest following up with this video.
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