Dennis wrote:

I'm sure this has been asked many a time....

I'm doing some work for a company that is currently doing their mechanical
dwgs using Microsoft Visio. It's slow, impractical and a *major* PITA to
use.

Most of the drawing are simply showing sheet metal layouts, hole locations
etc. A 2d package would be ok.


Has anyone found a open source or freeware package that is really usable.
I've used & really like SolidWorks but the company is small and
unwilling/unable to spent $100 let alone many thousands!

I've found a couple BRL-Cad and FreeCad - any experience anyone?

Well, there's OpenCascade:
http://www.opencascade.org/

But you'd have to be, or have on hand, a ****-hot C++ programmer; I looked
into it, and it's basically a huge library of Classes that can do stuff,
but you still have to be a programmer to hook them all together in the right
order. ;-)

Good Luck!
Rich