Looking for a recommendation for further design software.

[Marm]

CA... did you miss my post?

[dklassen]

DesignSpark isn't $800, it's free.

[curious aardvark]

DesignSpark isn't $800, it's free.

design spark is just for pcbs - designspark MECHANICAL is not free.

marm - saw the post. I just really don't get on with sketchup. I tried to make it do simple things for a while and it just would never work the way the tutorials said it would.

And I could possibly make an stl file of that model work in openscad. But I,m not actually designing a golf ball - that's just the only reference most people will understand :-)

I'm actually trying to design a more aerodynamic sling glande with patterned dimples. But the start is currently a sphere which i then stretch into a variety of different glande sizes and shapes.
Hence the golf ball reference.
I'd probably be better off adding the dimples after resizing as otherwise they'll be stretched and not round.
But 364 round spheres with decent facet numbers crashes openscad every bloody time.
So I haven't really got to grips with the actual better design side yet.

The idea is to eventually make a missile I can break the current world sling record with.

And that's around the 480 yard mark. So it's not going to be easy :-)

[dklassen]

DesignSpark MECHANICAL is in fact free. I use it almost everyday. You're looking at their new add on modules

You can download it right here... for free.

http://www.rs-online.com/designspark...age/mechanical

[Marm]

Well, I'm going to take a look at design spark. downloading now.

Interesting project CA. What material are you going to use?

[Sebastian Finke]

Another one: Solidface.

At $999 its not the cheapest and Cubify is probably still the better purchase but thought I'd add it anyway...

[iDig3Dprinting]

What about FreeCAD. We are currently investigating this at the moment, trying a couple of tutorials. The tutorials are quite useful although some are unfinished. We also spent a lot of time looking for functions that didn't exist on the version we were running, which was the default for Ubuntu (which isn't up to date).