Here’s a #FreeCAD tutorial that I hope might help get someone up and running on basic part design in FreeCAD.
Originally shared by Ketil Froyn
Learn 3D modelling for reprap and #3Dprinting with #FreeCAD. #Tutorial
I did a bit of playing with TinkerCAD, and I’ll finish that project first, but I’ll definitely playnwith this for my next project. Wargaming bits are easy to make by sticking basic polyhedrons together, so TinkerCAD was all I needed for that.
I’m watching FreeCAD with great interest. I’m having a lot of stability issues, but it’s shaping up to be a proper drafting package and is under active development. Plus I’m a crap magnet.
Hehe, “crap magnet” feels familiar. But I like FreeCAD better as I figure out more (I have little CAD experience). The FreeCAD forum seems to be thriving as well, which is a good sign. Things seems to be headed the right way, but it is beta, so save early and often.
I’d really like to see a package with toolpath generation in it for CNC and lasercutting though.
@Vik_Olliver that’s what my friends who model all say too. FreeCAD is great, and impressive but is missing a lot of the things they use in packages like Solidworks and Inventor. Movement modeling, flat-pack (metal press) design, etc.
@Vik_Olliver a cam module is under development. 0.14 will be fantastic.a assembly module is on its way as well.
Assembly is the deal breaker for me, but I have real faith in freecad. They seem to have some of the most intelligent developers around. The complexity of some of the features they add on a whim is staggering. Like scad import for example. It’s shaping up quickly.
@Sanjay_Mortimer if you want to test the assembly module for freecad see: http://sourceforge.net/p/free-cad/code/ci/jriegel/dev-assembly/~/tree/
its actually already quite usable.
@Ketil_Froyn A tip you may or may not know: you can set FreeCAD to make as many backups as you want. When you save your document, the previous state of your file is saved with a number appended to the file extension (.FCStd1, .FCStd2, …) you then only need to remove the number to open the file in FreeCAD.
And about your trouble with selecting external geometry: you can select edges that do not lie on the sketch plane, but you may need to rotate the view to do it. You won’t be able to select a circular edge though.
And thanks for that video! (I’m normandc on the FreeCAD forum)
@ThantiK The FreeCAD dev team is really small. 3 core developers, and less than half a dozen occasional contributors. At this rate it will take a very long time before it’s on par feature-wise with commercial packages. Still it has made great progress in the past 3 years and will hopefully continue to do so.
Holy crap that’s impressive.
@ThantiK Yeah, and they only work part time on it too, all of them have “real” jobs. I once made a feature request and it was added less than 16 hours later in the development branch.
@Normand_Chamberland Thanks for linking personas! 
I guess you’ve spotted me on the forum as ketilfroyn then.
I was aware of the backup feature, but I tend to save often, and then I end up too many versions to know which to revert to, or the version I need is beyond the revision count. So I rather rename manually when something significant is done.
Thanks for the info on selecting external geometry. But re: circular edges, I actually link to a circular edge already in the video, here:
Or did I misunderstand what you mean there?
@Ketil_Froyn Yeah, saving versions is always a pain (and actually in any CAD program I’ve worked with), with simple parts I let FreeCAD take care of it, but with complex parts I do as you do. FYI the FreeCAD devs plan to implement CVS support at some point, there’s a discussion about diff too. But it is low priority at the moment.
In the commercial world, I believe this is dealt with what they call PLM, or product lifecycle management. The big guys (Dassault, Siemens PLM and PTC) all have their offering. But since I’ve always worked for SMBs I haven’t had to deal with this added layer of complexity.
About selecting circular edges, I should have been more clear: there is no problem to select circular edges if they lie on the sketch plane, or on a parallel plane. But if the circular edge is on a plane perpendicular or at any angle to the sketch, it won’t be recognized.
@Normand_Chamberland OK, got it. Thanks for the info