For those who don't use it often, I also suspect most CAD packages are of
little use, supporting your thoughts. As a retired EE who used to do some ME,
I've seen people who live with CAD programs, and can effectively design on
them. For the rest of us, I think a simple CAD program (or good drawing
program?) can be useful for small tailoring of existing designs, or if you
need to make many small variations of a design.

For the rest of it, I made a drafting table, and bought a cheap machine on
eBay. That changed my hand sketches to reasonable drawings and, in many cases,
ended up being faster than drawing it with a CAD package. While some CAD's 3D
drawings might be nice, they take too long to produce, and my isometric
drawings are just as effective.

The last initial design use I had for CAD was in designing the drafting table
that replaced it.

As an aside, a previous post here noted FWW's choice of Design CAD, how the
price was under 100 and it came with several tutorial CDs. So I got a trial
copy and found out the rest of the story. Turns out they released a new
version. Don't know if this is a change, but the program itself does NOT come
with any tutorial CDs, instead you have to pay more for them. Design CAD did
appear to have potential, but their help text was next to useless and I gave
up on it and went back to my many-years-old copy of Intellidraw, which is
intuitive enough I can quickly relearn it whenever it's needed.

GerryG

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 10:26:03 -0600, "Jay Windley"
wrote:


"dteckie" wrote in message
. com...
|
| Well 3 out of 3 EE's agree. As an EE I also agree that using a CAD is
| somewaht useful but very time consuming.

I'm not an EE; my training is mostly ME. CAD, the way it's often meant to
be used, is usually about optimizing enterprise design, not necessarily
one-time informal designs by individuals. That's why I'm a little leery
about people just assuming they need CAD for woodworking projects. I want
to know what advantages they think they're going to get from it. That helps
me make a meaningful recommendataion.

--Jay