Design help and CAD tools

You don't need CAD to start

You can start a project from an idea, a sketch, a drawing, a photograph, a sample, a CAD file, or a physical part. A dimensioned napkin drawing is a real starting point. So is a phone photo of the bracket that snapped, with a tape measure next to it.

We do design and CAD in-house, and we have a 3D scanner, so an existing physical part can become a model without you drawing anything. Any design work a project needs is reviewed and scoped before anything gets made — you'll know what's being done before it starts.

What helps most, whatever you send:

• What the part does, and what it attaches to or fits inside
• The dimensions that are fixed by something else — a bolt pattern, a shaft diameter, an opening it has to clear
• Material and finish, if you have a preference or a reason
• How many you need now, and how many later
• Anything that has already failed, and how

If you want to try modeling it yourself

Two things to know before you download anything.

Mechanical CAD and mesh modeling are different crafts. Mechanical CAD works from dimensioned sketches and exact surfaces — a hole is 8 millimeters because you typed 8. Mesh modeling works from triangles pushed around by eye. Both are legitimate. Only one of them makes a bracket that bolts to something.

What matters is what comes out the far end. For 3D geometry that will be machined or formed, we want STEP. For flat cut parts, DXF. Every tool below can produce at least one of those. See files and formats for the detail.

Autodesk Fusion

Parametric mechanical CAD, and the most common answer for a hobbyist making mechanical parts. Autodesk offers Fusion free for qualifying non-commercial personal use. Eligibility is narrow and worth reading before you rely on it: Autodesk limits it to home-based, non-commercial projects. It isn't for company use.

The personal-use version is deliberately reduced — a limited number of active editable documents, limited 2D drawings, limited CAM, restricted file translation. The part that matters to us survives: STEP export is still available. If you're a business, you need a paid seat.

Onshape

Full mechanical CAD that runs entirely in a browser. Nothing to install, works on a Chromebook, real version control and proper 2D drawings built in. It exports STEP, DXF, DWG and STL.

The free plan carries one condition you must understand before you start: it is for non-commercial use only, and every document on it is public. Anyone can find your design and copy it. For a personal project you don't mind sharing, that's a fair trade for a serious CAD system. For anything confidential, or anything commercial, the free plan is the wrong choice — you need a paid plan for private documents.

FreeCAD

Free and open source. No eligibility category to qualify for, no revenue test, no public-document condition. Commercial use is fine. It's a parametric 3D modeler built for mechanical design, and it imports and exports STEP, DXF, STL and a long list of others.

The trade is the learning curve. FreeCAD is organized into workbenches you switch between, and it expects you to understand what you're doing more than the commercial tools do. The cost is your time rather than your license terms — which, if you're a business that doesn't want a subscription, is often the better deal.

Tinkercad

Free, browser-based, owned by Autodesk, and genuinely the best on-ramp if you have never modeled anything. It builds shapes by combining primitives marked as either solid or hole, which is a concept you can hold in your head in about ten minutes. It's widely used in schools for that reason, and that's a compliment.

It exports mesh files, STL among them, which we accept. Mesh output is fine when the part is going to be 3D printed. It's a weaker starting point for something that will be machined or formed, because a mesh approximates curves rather than defining them. For a spacer, an enclosure, a simple bracket or a printed prototype, Tinkercad is a perfectly reasonable answer and you'll finish it tonight.

Blender — and when it is the wrong tool

Blender is free and open source, commercial use included, and it is superb. It is also not CAD. It's a 3D creation suite for modeling, sculpting, animation, rendering and VFX, and it works in polygon meshes.

If you sit down in Blender to design a mounting bracket with a bolt pattern, you'll have a bad evening. There are no dimension-driven sketches in the engineering sense, and what arrives here will be a mesh with no units and approximate holes.

Where Blender is the right answer: organic shapes. A grip, a handle contoured to a hand, a figurine, a housing whose form is judged by eye rather than by dimension. Sculpt it in Blender, and tell us in the notes that the fitted features need to be defined properly — that's a normal, workable way to start.

Short version

• Never modeled anything before: Tinkercad.
• A mechanical part, personal project, want room to grow: Fusion personal use.
• A business, or you want no license conditions at all: FreeCAD.
• Browser-only, collaborating, and the design isn't confidential: Onshape free.
• A sculpted or organic shape: Blender.
• A precise mechanical part in Blender: no.

What "manufacturing-ready" means

A manufacturing-ready model represents one unambiguous physical object. Nothing about it should require a phone call to interpret. Run this check on the exported file, not on your screen — open the STEP or STL you're about to send in a free viewer and look at it fresh.

• Closed solid. No gaps, no holes in the surface, no self-intersections, no zero-thickness faces. If software can't tell inside from outside, nothing downstream can either.
• Units and scale correct. This is the single most common avoidable error. STL carries no units at all, so a part can arrive 25.4 times too big or too small and look perfectly normal. Say the units in your message even when the format stores them.
• One part per file. Assemblies get handled separately, not merged into one body.
• Sensible origin and orientation. Put the origin somewhere meaningful — a face, a center, a corner — and orient the part the way you'd describe it.
• No stray bodies. Delete leftover construction geometry, hidden duplicates, reference solids and the old version you kept "just in case."
• Internal corners in machined parts. A rotating cutter can't produce a sharp internal corner. Model a radius there, or expect us to add one.

When a drawing is worth making

The model says what shape the part is. The drawing says what matters about it. A model can't tell us that one bore controls the whole assembly while every other dimension is cosmetic.

Make a drawing when the part mates with something else, when material or finish is specified, when features will be inspected, or when someone may reorder it later from a different file. Skip it for a one-off printed prototype where the shape is the whole requirement.

What earns its place on the drawing:

• Title block — part name, part number, revision, date, units, scale, who drew it
• Material and any specification it must meet
• Finish or coating callouts, and which surfaces they apply to
• The few dimensions that control fit or function — mark those, leave the rest to a general note
• Thread and hole callouts
• Notes — sharp-edge treatment, marking, packaging
• A revision block

On tolerances: mark the handful that control fit, say what the part mates with, and let a general note cover everything else. Tolerances are reviewed per project. Ordinary work is made and verified in-house; when a drawing calls for something tight, the job goes to a partner who can supply a CMM report, which usually costs less than trying it twice.

Send the drawing as a PDF alongside the model, never instead of it.

When to just let us do it

Hand it over when:

• You have no CAD and no wish to learn it. Completely normal.
• Your model failed the self-check above and you don't know why.
• The part exists physically. Scanning is faster than remodeling.
• It has to fit something you can't measure well enough to model.
• You've spent more hours on the file than the design work would have been worth.

We design and model parts here, and we'd rather start from your sketch than repair a file you fought with. Tell us what the part has to do, and we'll scope the design work before anything is made.

Call (321) 321-9220, email [email protected], or upload what you have. We reply the same business day, usually within the hour. Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm Eastern, closed federal holidays.