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Unanswered Best free CAD program for making mechanical gears

Discussion in 'General Questions' started by Louis Tiger, Oct 8, 2015.

  1. Louis Tiger

    Louis Tiger Member

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    Exactly what the title says. I would like to find a good free CAD program so I could design working mechanical gears. Also, if someone knows a good youtube or website tutorial for that subject, I would also appreciate knowing.

    Thanks!
     
    #1 Louis Tiger, Oct 8, 2015
  2. janot928

    janot928 Active Member

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    well as long as you can find a parametrable model and you know the basic rules for gears mechanism (wikipedia is your friend) any should do the trick. I use Catia v5 but that is not free (unless you know how to torrent :p)
     
    #2 janot928, Oct 9, 2015
  3. janot928

    janot928 Active Member

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    #3 janot928, Oct 9, 2015
  4. daniel871

    daniel871 Well-Known Member

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    #4 daniel871, Oct 9, 2015
  5. WheresWaldo

    WheresWaldo Volunteer ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡°)
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    FreeCAD might be the best, especially with the script for building working gears. Current stable version is 15. And it is cross platform, running on Windows, Linux and OSX. It has a rather large following and can run python written Macros. In their forums are many more scripting examples. And there are literally over 18,000 videos on YouTube.

    http://www.freecadweb.org/
    http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Macros_recipes
    http://forum.freecadweb.org/
    https://www.youtube.com/results?search_sort=video_date_uploaded&search_query=FreeCAD

    Besides this, FreeCAD is the only FREE tool I know that can take an STL and turn it back into a solid. (although that process is not 100% and it is very slow, sometimes taking hours at 100% CPU utilization.)
     
    #5 WheresWaldo, Oct 9, 2015
  6. Doncrush

    Doncrush New Member

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    Onshape!


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
     
    #6 Doncrush, Oct 18, 2015
  7. WheresWaldo

    WheresWaldo Volunteer ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡°)
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    There does not appear to be anything easy or automated about making gears with OnShape.

    123Design is a joke for modeling gears, it is made to be a lightweight beginner type of CAD program.
     
    #7 WheresWaldo, Oct 18, 2015
  8. Doncrush

    Doncrush New Member

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    On shape will add features if you request it!


    Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
     
    #8 Doncrush, Oct 20, 2015

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