OK, I have found that my donor parts are too wide to fit in either a standard book or plus 4 chassis, so I'm going to have to design one myself.

I'll be going off Ron C's book design and widening it to suit, but I also need to see what angles may be affected, and probably lengthen it a bit to keep it in proportion.

Sooo...... I really need to draw it on a CAD program. So what's a good, and preferably free (or at least cheap) and easy to use CAD program that I can use to draw up my chassis plans?

[Edited on 5/4/08 by aerosam]

I use Solidworks and Autocad these days, neither of which is cheap, but you can get pretty good results with google sketchup, I use the pro version for book illustration but the free version is pretty good and very easy to learn.

Sketchup





Cheers

Chris

Chris,

A jade chassis?

You puff!

Thanks mate!!

It's cyan actually

Cheers

Chris

I use solidworks which would be good for the chassis but isnt so easy to work with curved body pannels (it is possible but not easy for a beginner).

as mentioned above its not cheap.

although you may find a copy floating around mininova or somewhere similar.

I know pro/desktop is fairly cheap if you want to use a legal copy but i dont know if thats just cheap for students. my old school sold us copys for £10

Jade??? Cyan???

WTF???

Real men only know the names of about 5 colours....

(Disclaimer....I do know of Cyan, but I was in the printing industry for a while)

SolidEdge/Unigraphics is the other common industry standard.
- Again not cheap if your paying for it....

Whats wrong with pencil and paper? CAD looks nice admittedly but its going to take twice as long. I've tried programmes in the past and I've been trying this Sketchup for the last hour but I just don't get it. All seems over complicated to me. At most I'd use Microsoft Paint otherwise its the old fashioned way.

CAD is for girls, real men weld and design at the same time

Might be worth trying Alibre, the basic program (Alibre express) can be downloaded free - www.alibre.com - Whilst it is feature limited it should be sufficient for basic chassis modelling.

I have been using the full version for a few years (it was the most cost effective option when I bought) and have been able to design a complete car without any major problems.

I used to earn my living using AutoCAD, but my vote goes to Solid Works if you can get it, or Google's sketchup if you can't. Sketch up is a great intuitive program, but doesn't have the ability to link to a FEA package like Solid Works does.

A couple of weeks ago I set up a library of CAD files that are relevant to Locost design here, there are various formats on it (AutoCAD, Sketchup mainly)

Locost CAD files

The files are not my work, I've just colated them. If you have other files to add then please get in touch via that site.

[Edited on 6/4/08 by Puk]

Yep, I've been using AutoCAD since 1990 when it was crap, now I teach it at University using version 2008. Not used Solidworks, but I do use Navisworks for 3D walk throughs.

I think it's a great tool for chassis design. Not sure about the comments on real men weld?, pathetic.

Using cad helps you get a full picture of the car without wasting paper and expense. I still sketch and use bits of wood for templates though!! :-0

well, for me i like the freedom of 3d environment, i have tried solid edge, pro/engineer, catia... i like most the last one ( the most common in big automotive and aircraft industry, but costs fortune) i don't like autocad well im not used to 2d so much now, for quick 2d i rather use corel draw donno why maybe because it loads faster ($hitdows) but nowadays when you look over the school program you don't have paper and pencil work, only CAE.

[Edited on 6/4/08 by verbel]

catia will cost you a cool £16k for one license . its pretty good tho .

the alibre you can get for free is pretty good , but you cant save them as DXF .

I use Autocad for my 2d, quick stuff for my own use. Then port that into Solidworks when needed.

I've found that the two work well together. The other package I use is Rhinoceros3d, an excellent surfacing 3d package, and relatively cheap when compared to the other two.

With Solidworks and Rhino, you end up with 99% of the 3d solids and 'A' class surfacing you get with Catia, at a small fraction of the cost.

Something often overlooked, is a thing that comes free with Solidworks, DwgEditor, which is a dead ringer for A'cad, except it uses the Solidworks engine. Gives far better splines and curves, and uses A'cad commands.

All of the above can be found on the 'net as 'demo' versions.

Cheers,
Syd.

I'll put in a vote for Solidworks. It's not an easy package to learn once you get past the basic stuff. I think the basics are pretty easy. The other good thing is that there's lots of tutorials and info out there on teh interweb. That's really how I got the hang of it. SW is expensive but there are ways and means of obtaining an "evaluation" copy *wink* quite rapidly if you look around.

The other factor to look at is how long you want to spend learning the damn package before you can do anything effective. I'd rate all 3D packages as hard to learn from scratch.

For a complete CAD novice though - I'd vote for Google Sketchup.

Someone wrote, tongue in cheek, that CAD was for puffs and real men just fire up the welder. Whilst I agree cyan is indeed for puffs, not using CAD is a bit like setting off for Timbuk2 without a map. Welding up a chassis and then discovering that there isn't enough ground clearance under the sump is really rather an expensive approach! Not to mention demoralizing.

Right I'd best pop my soap box back and get on with the day job.

My opinions based on my experiences of them.

I found solid works and autodesk inventor both easy to learn for basic things and they werent too hard for some of the more advanced bits either. Both come bundled with FEA software for you to make inacurate pretty pictures with although it is nice for seeing where stress concentrations are for different loads. Some things prove quite difficult to do in them and reflect the fact their low end packages.

I would advise staying away from solidedge as i find its hard work trying to get it to do things. You also seem to have twice as many things to click for the same function in other packages.

Unigraphics NX2,4 etc. High end package which is good when you come to take models to drawings etc (inventor and solidworks are miles behind in this respect). Can model anything once you figure out how to do it / have the right plug in. It can be really frustrating at time, and it you have it set to anything except advanced user it seems to hide all the tools you actually want to use.

Pro E wildfire similar to above but i found it much less intuative to learn. I love the project curves against each other function though.

Catia, ive only had a little play with this but seemed very similar to NX in terms of functionality. It also had loads of plug ins that i never needed to use.

AutoCAD whilst good for draughting i found nearly impossible for modelling. Then again im sure it was designed for draughting not modelling.

Some of the surface modelling packages are nice for making representations of things, but im not sure you can generate draughts out of them.

The cost of some of the packages will make you cry if you want to buy them! As said above Catia (and NX) are about £16K per seat for the BASIC package.

Student licences of solidworks are about £100 - £200 depending on plugins. Inventor is free for the 1yr student evaluation version, but any draught you do will have a massive "STUDENT COPY ONLY " (or similar) obscuring lots of detail.

There are lots of cracked copies floating about on the net on torrents or emule etc. Some people choose to download these.

[Edited on 7/4/08 by jono_misfit]

I've used TurboCad for a few years now and it has done all I required of it. Once you get to know the basics it is really quite easy to work with. Depending on which version you choose it's available for free up to C£600, I think version 11 Deluxe is £30, well worth it in my opinion.

See the Avanquest web site

NTDWM

Mick

I really should have another look at Turbo CAD. I had a copy years ago for Win98 and quite liked it. How does it go with curved surfaces Mick?

You guys will probably make fun of me, but when I want to bang something together quick for design ideas, or just a rough layout I just use Rhino3D. It's just sooooo fast and easy compared to solidworks etc and I rarely need anything more accurate. Except when Im sending things to be CNC'ed
Cheers.