I believe I was the other one, and I agree with everything Mike said here. Its not that I cant use it at all, I just cant yet. LOL. I’m sure once I can sit down and focus on it that it will be pretty easy to manage.
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Would. You learn Blender for me too please?
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My point of that statement was more of, I am not a good judge of how different they are. To me, they seem the same (except the way things are handled), you guys see it as more different than I do. Hope that didn’t come off weird, no offense or anything, promise.
So I just made a couple drastic changes and the recovery on my model as super easy. 2 funky tangents, and a missing chamfer (that is list as such). Nothing any further down the line. This is getting super fun again. I can experiment more and not have to spend forever recovering.
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Your renders are the catalyst to me letting go of fusions render engine and think about onshape and it’s lack of rendering. I will say onshape’s regular models look a lot better though.
That’s interesting - I find I am using it more and more for all sorts of things. Measuring between vertices through an object can be very useful and even when it’s not I do it because I can. 
No offense at all. That was what I was trying to convey as well. I don’t think there are really any barriers to anyone who is willing to make the transition and give it an honest shot, but if you have no other experience except Fusion, I don’t think you’ll be productive at first open.
The way I see it, is that most of these softwares, at the core, are very similar. Sketch, extrude, sweep, loft, combine, etc, etc. if you understand what all of those are and what they do, that’s half the battle.
Now I just have to figure out which order to push those buttons, and where they hid them at lol
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All I want is a colored line to represent each measurement, so I am confident it is what I think it is. Fusion would measure all sorts of random things so I am a bit traumatized by it. Try to measure a 2D view and fusion often pics something on the other side of the model.
I think with one shared model of something you are interested in changing in some way would get you up to speed really fast.
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I use onshape. I think browser based has some big advantages. Mostly because I already have firefox installed. Fusion doesn’t work in Linux. When I tried it many years ago, it was hard. I didn’t try Onshape until a few years later. I think the main difference was that I was more experienced and I was ready to learn CAD.
It is nice to show my kids or wife onshape and just let them poke at it.
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DUDE! Just hover on the dimension and a line shows on the model…Happy kid again!!
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That sounds like a statement that could be about any CAD tool I’ve ever used. I think ultimately it comes down to what you’re used to, what your ‘normal’ workflow is, what kind of projects you’re working on and what you’re trying to accomplish.
I tend to make things that are pretty basic, usually with not too many different parts. I tend to design parts in isolation and then bring them into a model as a secondary step. That seems a little more awkward in OnShape, but manageable. I’m not familiar with Fusion but it looks pretty cool in this respect.
A friend of mine works in packaging and does the mold design for a variety of different plastic and glass bottles, tubs, tubes etc. He likes Solidworks because it has some enough sculpting and rendering tools that he can use it directly alongside client feedback to make things look a certain way while also being enough of a CAD tool that he can then use that to design the moulds, right down to things like ejection pins, sliding multi-piece cores, all sorts of stuff. In most other workflows that would be 2 separate tools. Something like Blender for the ‘pretty’ part and then the need to translate that to another tool for the mould design, along with the significant potential for mistakes that this entails.
So yeah, someone’s opinion of a CAD tool is likely tied pretty intimately to how they personally use it and what they’re using it for.
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agree 100%
While I have the attention of the class, If I were to make another LowRider would it big a big deal if I used new strut plates? They are bigger than needed and I could make some printed parts smaller with smaller plates. Or I could just use the same ones, it doesn’t save a ton of plastic and that makes the upgrade path a smidge easier, and the instructions easier because we can reuse AZA’s files…
If I were to try and be a bit more technical I think a smaller core is more rigid.
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To expand on that, I really like Altium Designer for PCB layout, largely because I know how to use it but also because it has some of the best control over copper regions/pours that I’ve come across. In power electronics the designs live and die by their use of copper and the reliability of spacing between copper structures for voltage isolation.
On the other hand, companies doing things like motherboard or cellphone board layout tend to like things like one of the Mentor Graphics products because there’s a ton of co-design features where you can have a dozen people laying out a board in parallel.
People often don’t like Altium when starting out because it’s too much of a ‘corporate’ workflow, where you’re making changes, generating ECOs, syncing those changes between files, that kinda thing. When you’re used to it, it’s no big deal. When you’re not, it’s a needless and confusing extra step.
Same deal with simulation tools. I liked Ansys/Maxwell because it was a specific magnetic/electric field simulation tool and as a result had a lot of tools for easily working directly in inductances within it. You can define 2 coils and have it just tell you straight off what the inductance and coupling factor between those two coils were. My current workplace uses Comsol Multiphysics. They like it because it’s inherently one interface with whatever physics solver you want on top of it. You can do thermal, mechanical, some electrical, magnetic, high frequency etc. all within the same fundamental model and have those solutions feed seamlessly between each other.
Comsol kinda sucks in some ways because it’s hard to just get a bloody inductance or coupling out without having a bunch of scripting. Ansys sucks because it’s difficult working between multiple tools to accomplish simple multi-physics simulations, largely because it’s a suite of different tools purchased from different people at different times and stacked on top of each other, wearing a trench-coat…
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Aren’t most people cutting their own strut plates as a first job, anyway? Given how many people seem to be willing to spend money to chase rigidity (or at least to avoid the possibility of a lack of rigidity), that seems reasonable?
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It would be a bigger deal if you didn’t make incremental improvements along the way - that’s the whole point of making a new one!!
Go your hardest!
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I think Onshape’s assembly process is one of it’s super powers, but it seems a bit clumsy using external STEP or STL files. Or that might be me.
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Yeah, it might just depend on what you’re used to, what you expect or what you’re doing etc.
For me, I tend to make parts separately, assemble them and then edit them in place to fix any conflicts, tie critical dimensions together etc. Fusion looks awesome in that you can do it all from a single sketch. OnShape seems a little weird because it hasn’t quite ‘clicked’ yet. I make multiple parts and assemble them, but then I end up with a spray of parts named things like ‘cross member’, ‘front upright’ etc. Similar to Solidworks, but at least that’s all segregated into its own folder.
This is the perspective from a VERY novice OnShape user, though. My crowning achievement in it so far is a basic compost bin…
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I thought it was already going to be a new strut lol. I’m good either way. I can reuse the ones I have or cut new ones. Which ever is going to give us the best CNC. I couldn’t care less about saving a little plastic lol.
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I’ll remake every part. No big deal
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New strut plates are good. I didn’t make the tool for the totally configurable plate dxfs though. But if I go to a new version, I don’t mind cutting new plates before I do.
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I don’t need another CNC, still setting up my Maslow. Even so, I’d like to sign up for the LR4 Beta and build one 
Will the same smaller Core and Strut/Beam work for people with their 1.5kw+ spindles, and people that go bigger than common 1.25HP trim routers? I have no idea how many of your current, and potential, Customers use, or prefer to use larger spindles. Maybe there’s not enough people to make it worth your time (at this point) designing for every scenario.
Guessing we’ll collectively pitch in and figure out the least frustrating way to enable Makers. For whatever Strut(s)/beam design you decide on, and/or other aspects of the design that are likely to be parametric/customized by people YZ (plate?) height, etc…
Hopefully, we’ll collectively figure out an easy straight forward way for the Community to download .SVG/.STL files they need from the LR v.next calculator. Using Jamie’s script like we did for LR3, and/or someone elses OpenScad representation/replica of the Strut plate, or, Fusion python script if the model is parametric, or, using FeatureScript if we’re using OnShape, or, some other nifty tool(s)?
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