Fun with CAD

I kick myself sometimes for doing this, but after a long day of engineering at work I like to relax -- by playing with engineering software at home. I recently found this program called FreeCAD, and once I got it up and running I've been having a lot of fun trying to get things done, or at least drawn, using it.

A View Of The Tee In The CAD Program

This first picture is something I slapped together pretty quickly, a reinforced forged tee like one we might use on a header. I used cylinder and cone primitives to make the tee body, another set of cylinders to cut out the inner parts, put in some critical fillets, and then sketched out the bore used it to create a shape to cut the end preps. This all seemed pretty straightforward, especially creating and combining the 3-D shape primitives.

The Tee As Seen On A Drawing

I then used the drawing creation utility to start a drawing. I got a nice side view (except that one line wouldn't show up), and added a projection. I have no idea (yet) how to add dimensions or text. The problems may be me, or it may be that FreeCAD isn't quite done yet.

What hasn't been so successful is creating bent tubes and pipes. I've been drawing the tubes in QCAD -- I've been using it for a while, and just sprung for the professional version -- then trying to import them into FreeCAD and turn them into 3-D objects, with very little luck. There are several laborious ways to make tubes, but none that just convert from polyline to tube the way I want.

We'll see how it all works out.