• Scam Alert. Members are reminded to NOT send money to buy anything. Don't buy things remote and have it shipped - go get it yourself, pay in person, and take your equipment with you. Scammers have burned people on this forum. Urgency, secrecy, excuses, selling for friend, newish members, FUD, are RED FLAGS. A video conference call is not adequate assurance. Face to face interactions are required. Please report suspicions to the forum admins. Stay Safe - anyone can get scammed.
  • Several Regions have held meetups already, but others are being planned or are evaluating the interest. The Calgary Area Meetup is set for Saturday July 12th at 10am. The signup thread is here! Arbutus has also explored interest in a Fraser Valley meetup but it seems members either missed his thread or had other plans. Let him know if you are interested in a meetup later in the year by posting here! Slowpoke is trying to pull together an Ottawa area meetup later this summer. No date has been selected yet, so let him know if you are interested here! We are not aware of any other meetups being planned this year. If you are interested in doing something in your area, let everyone know and make it happen! Meetups are a great way to make new machining friends and get hands on help in your area. Don’t be shy, sign up and come, or plan your own meetup!

Solidworks for Makers @ CAD30.00 per year

Manfred

Manfred

Active Member
Premium Member
Solidworks for makers special offer. 50% off until 25 July. $30.00 Canadian

discover.solidworks.com

Power the Maker Within

Choose from two comprehensive design packages from SOLIDWORKS for Makers, industry leading 3D CAD software for hobbyists and personal projects.
discover.solidworks.com discover.solidworks.com

I have never used Solidworks but will take this as an opportunity to finally learn CAD/M.

NOTE: Set to auto-renew annually.
 
Word of warning. SolidWorks for Makers is a hot mess. The CAM is completely incomprehensible and the whole platform is very resource intensive. My i7 machine with 36 GB of RAM ran at a crawl.

I'd do yourself a favor and learn Fusion.
 
I think the 3DExperience Solidworks for Makers (PC installation) is the one to (attempt to) get, presuming you can navigate through their swamp & it doesn't blow up on some future update. The CAD engine itself is great. But if there was an award for worst corporate software website ever, 3DE would be a perennial champion.


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I would avoid getting hooked on solidworks. I used to use it before I switched to fusion 360. When doing the switch I found things to be backwards when using fusion. I had some ingrained habits that took a while to break. I can't remember exactly what the differences were. I have a lifetime fixed price deal from fusion so I'm pretty much locked in now. I seem to recall that last time I checked that a person could get 15 years of fusion for the price of solidworks.
 
Only two CAD softwares that I have used so far are Creo Parametric and OnShape. I found Creo to be very difficult, although part of that will be that it was also the first CAD package I'd ever used. OnShape on the other hand is fantastic. It runs in a browser with all the compute intensive stuff handled through cloud magic (which normally I'd be against, but in this case I'll take it) and so far it has done everything I've wanted. My only gripe is that their built in thread tool is pretty garbage. I've heard that somebody has made a plugin/extension, which provides much better thread modelling though. They have a free to use license level too, so it might be worth trying out if you haven't already
 
I use Solidworks at work and Solidworks for makers at home and generally like it (I've used a variety of other CAD platforms in the past as well). I don't have performance issues on my home computer (ryzen 5 5600x w/ 32 gb RAM) but I also don't do all that much with it at home. Note that it needs an active internet connection and regularly forgets your login credentials (at least for me).

The built-in CAM is based on CAMWorks and is pretty well regarded. It's main "value add" is automatic feature recognition which will effectively generate the CAM for you straight from the model, but getting all the settings right feels much more unintuitive and "indirect" at least to me.

I'm currently in the process of learning SolidCAM (which has a free tier w/ a legit solidworks license) which so far feels somewhat more intuitive but is also very feature-rich (steep learning curve).
 
I have just gotten back into solidworks (work got me a license) and have dug up the training manual and accompanying training files if anyone is interested i can post a link. it got me making some complex parts by lesson 3 and .. i stopped doing it as it told me enough to do what i needed at the time. but is decent
 
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