Garden Railway Coach O&K

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chrisb
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Re: Garden Railway Coach O&K

Post by chrisb »

If you want to learn about Sketcher: Here is a tutorial which will show you how to do a rectangle fully constrained in less than a minute: https://owncloud.gwdg.de/index.php/s/HS ... I/download. Be warned: It will take some time to work through the document, but I hope you will get payd back by handling Sketcher faster in the future.
A Sketcher Lecture with in-depth information is available in English, auf Deutsch, en français, en español.
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bejant
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Re: Garden Railway Coach O&K

Post by bejant »

Hi mp77Bushnell, and welcome!
mp77Bushnell wrote: Sun Dec 23, 2018 8:58 pm Maybe I'm starting in the wrong place or something but...
I open a "part design" create a sketch (XY)
Draw a line.
And then (even with the Drawing Dimension "workbench" which seems to load (but might not be supported 17 and beyond) it gives me an error.
Flustered? Me? Yep.

That's the wrong work flow. In Sketcher you generally plop down some basic and rough geometry, then better define that geometry as you go along in that same Sketch by applying Constraints (Length, Angle, positions, etc.) to that Geometry. Constraints remove Degrees Of Freedom (DOF) in the Sketch, or in other words: Constraints remove ambiguity. Eventually, in your Sketch you will want to end up with an enclosed perimeter of white geometry where no edges cross one another, and have only two white edges at any one vertex, and no remaining DOF (which means the Sketch has become "Fully Constrained"). When a Sketch becomes Fully Constrained, the formerly white geometry turns green in Sketcher.

Sketcher info:
https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Sketcher_Workbench

and the Sketcher Manual at the bottom of this post is very helpful:
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 04#p248329

In Part Design, after you have one Sketch that is Fully Constrained and encloses one overall area, you apply some Additive Tool to it (maybe Pad or Revolve) that creates a Solid from your Sketch by moving it through the 3D space. You can have smaller enclosed areas inside the overall perimeter of your Sketch, and these will become voids.

Part Design info:
https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/PartDesign_Workbench

You can also begin the model with an Additive Primitive (Cube, Sphere, Cone, etc.) instead of a Sketch.

From here you create other Sketches and apply Additive or Subtraction tools to add or remove material from your solid.

After you have modeled your solid thing, you can make a 2D Drawing of it. The Drawing Dimensioning WB was a handy WB for doing that but it has been superseded by the newer Tech Draw WB.

Tech Draw info:
https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/TechDraw_Module
mp77Bushnell wrote: Sun Dec 23, 2018 8:58 pm Can you or anyone recommend Good documentation or even Youtube tutorials that can help "me" learn how to do what should be "easy" CAD tasks.
How about you upload a hand sketch, including your measurements, of some piece you'd like to model and we can show you how to get started?

mp77Bushnell wrote: Sun Dec 23, 2018 8:58 pm need a query whether FreeCad has what Inventor calls "replicate" where I can take a "window" and replicate (duplicate it) at a set offset a certain number of times?? (Result 20 windows along a car side with the proper spacing....
Part Design WB > Linear Pattern will do that. You can also use Part Design WB > Clone.

Info on all WB's :
https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Workbenches

mp77Bushnell wrote: Sun Dec 23, 2018 8:58 pm Yeah I know "can't beat the price" but wouldn't it be nice to have it work without a secret decoding ring and secret handshakes??
There aren't any secrets, although I'll first suggest you try to forget whatever work flow you learned using AutoCAD and Inventor.
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