FreeCad

[webby2]

Found something nice in FreeCad 17.

I have been printing out a bunch of gears and have had issues with the accuracy of my placement of those gears so that I have enough slop to not bind but keeping them close enough to do there job,, well in FreeCad Involute Gears there is an option for "shift" which changes the ratio between the heel and toe of the gear, or is that peak and valley,,, and there is "clearance" that sets the depth of clearance for the valley.

I have been re-printing some gears with these options tweaked and it works so much nicer,, just print, clean up and place them right where they are supposed to be and PRESTO! they work smoothly.

I have been using FreeCad for all my design work and part creation,, it can do way more than I need and I am only using the basic functions but it is nice and easy to use.

[webby2]

I had to learn how to use the "loft" thingy in Freecad.

I tried to use some scripts I found online but they did not exactly do what I wanted.  After putzing around for a long time I was able to get the loft function figured out enough to use it to make the part I wanted.

Freecad is up to 0.19 and the appimage works fairly well so no need to install anything but a few basic configuration files.