Structual Steel Drawings?

[Gerry1964]

Hi all, I've started to do quite a bit of structual steel work and was looking for an Easy and ideally Free cad package that does structual steel drawings??

I got a full blown edition of AutoCad, but i cant for the life of me get into it, Is there anything out there easier???

Mainly its just the drawing of the beams, and flats with the option of letting me add holes and cut outs where needed, oh and dimensions

Might have to go back to MS Paint

[Eric C]

Sketch up is a good free program that you can save drawings in and modify as you need to. You can also get stuff other people have drawn from the online warehouse. It is a little different than cad type programs, but it just takes some time to learn. If you need to do real shop drawings for contracts and submittals you may want to buy the pro version that comes with layout.

[markfuga]

Do you just need a drawing program or do you need the engineering functions that come with programs like Autocad (stress load calcs, etc)? If just drawing, then I agree with Eric, Google Sketchup is becoming the standard. Here's a model of my basement as an example.
I recently aquired a couple new machines that I want to put in this space so I just skecthed up the area (15' x 43') and then started putting stuff into it. Everything is to exact size/scale so I know exactly how I can fit stuff in there. This made re-arraging things a breeze without moving a physical peice of equipment. I shuffled things around in the model a couple times before I had an arrangment I was happy with. Also to Eric's point, most of the stuff was downloaded from the 3D warehouse (cars, mill, lathe, generator, air compressor, workbench, etc). I just needed to scale these items to appropirate dimensions for my model.

[Seb650R]

Never played with google sketch up. I detest autocad. Its wonky and overcomplicated. My personal favorites would be Pro Engineer and SolidWorks. They are 3d modeling programs that are really easy to use when you get the hang of them. They can produce assemblies and such (very good for design work). Then printing drafts is a snap. I've used Pro E to model a lot of parts. Its also what they teach us in my mechanical engineering technology program.

[Gobysky]

Originally Posted by Eric C

Sketch up is a good free program that you can save drawings in and modify as you need to. You can also get stuff other people have drawn from the online warehouse. It is a little different than cad type programs, but it just takes some time to learn. If you need to do real shop drawings for contracts and submittals you may want to buy the pro version that comes with layout.

After all the research, I have gone with Sketchup. I used to use TurboCad years ago when I remodeled my basement.

There is a bit of learning with Sketchup, but I can't believe how many instructional YouTube video's there are. I liked the program enough where I bought the Pro version and I'm using it only for home & friend projects. The detail you can create with measured accuracy is incredible. Navigating around a 3d drawing has great advantages to idea creation.

The only thing I wish Sketchup had was a way to adjust the resolution on exported JPG pictures. The picture really doesn't give the program credit for what you see on the screen. Here's a partially finished drawing of an already built cabinet I've built, to fit on top of my tool box. I've only used the program 4 days now.

[Machine_Punk]

I really like Alibre Design 3D for 3D drawing of projects (about $200 for the home user version). BUT, there is a STEEP learning curve to designing in 3D. Once you design the 3D objects, though, Alibre can output the design into pretty much any 2D drawing format you might need.

You can do a 30-day trial to see if you like it, then decide whether or not you want to plunk down $200 on it.

Kev

[Dave1941]

I use CadStd to make machine drawings but would like something more accurate. Can Sketchup do mechanical drawings?