CAD For Woodworkers

Q: Has anyone ever seen a resonably priced PC based computer aided design software for woodworking? If you have used something pls. rate it with a 5 Star scale. I am looking for something that works in inches or metric and could be used to design then help layout the parts on the wood for ease of cut and/or maximum useage.

A: -Delta Cad's not bad. Basic cad program. Learning curve is pretty short. Not designed around woodworking but at $40.00 it works great, and they have a trial edition to check out. www.deltacad.com -A CAD program is only as good as the ability of the user. Too many people think a CAD program will provide an *uninitated* user with the abilty to design amazing things. It won't. It will only reflect your previous abilities, whatever they may be. If you can't *draw* worth a damn, every CAD program will remind you of this. If you CAN draw worth a damn, you don't really need a CAD program unless you are doing repititious design drawings. Designing woodworking projects on CAD is largely a waste of time. I use CAD for my daily sustenance (designing buildings, etc.) but I draw my woodworking projects by hand on graph paper, then once they are perfected, they are incorporated into CAD. I use AutoCAD, the

industry standard. -AutoCad at one time was one of the good CAD programs available. But as CW said it's rather dated now. If you know how to draw, a good CAD program will be an asset. If you don't know how to draw a CAD program will not be a lot of help. I use Anvil-1000 at home and I wouldn't trade it for anything. It cost about $2500 when it was available prior to the turn of the century. The reason I use and like it is because the software we had at work then was based off of Anvil-4000, a 3-D version of Anvil-1000. Today at work we use Pro-Engineer, a solid modeling package. This has way too much horsepower for the home user for a woodworking project.