FreeCAD News

It’s won­der­ful to see peo­ple tak­ing their first steps in CAD using FreeCAD and it’s even bet­ter when some­one’s first project is to cre­ate some­thing use­ful. In this case, new to FreeCAD Ang­harad, was moti­vat­ed to learn to mend a faulty kitchen bin which she real­ly liked.

Chat­ting with Ang­harad she out­lined the moti­va­tion to learn and how she found the process. 

  “I had nev­er done any CAD before, It had always appealed to me but I found it quite intim­i­dat­ing to get start­ed so when I learned about FreeCAD I thought I’d give it a go! I was ren­o­vat­ing the kitchen in my first home and spent a bit too much on what I thought was a decent bin that suit­ed the space. It was a ped­al bin that had two com­part­ments fit­ted with inde­pen­dent ped­als. After a cou­ple of months the plas­tic part that con­nect­ed the ped­al mech­a­nism to the bin lid on both sides had snapped so the ped­als no longer worked.

  I tried repair­ing the bin with dif­fer­ent bits I had around the house but noth­ing worked so when I start­ed attend­ing a local mak­er­space and learned about Free CAD I was encour­aged to have a go at design­ing a part that would fix the ped­al mech­a­nism.”

Ang­harad used Sketch­er and the Part Design to design a replace­ment glue in sec­tion for the plas­tic part that had bro­ken. Whilst not a huge­ly com­plex part it needs a vari­ety of CAD approach­es, sketch­ing on faces, extrud­ing and pock­et­ing as well as cham­fer­ing. It cer­tain­ly is enough of a project as when total­ly new to CAD. Ang­harad then learnt how to 3D print the design in her local mak­er­space using PETG to print the com­po­nent. Final­ly she used epoxy resin to glue the replace­ment part into place.

When asked, Ang­harad seemed to have enjoyed her first expe­ri­ence of FreeCAD and is keen to explore and learn more. 

 “I found the FreeCAD inter­face quite intu­itive after a cou­ple of test pieces which meant that once I had cre­at­ed the basic shape of my design, the process of refin­ing and alter­ing felt very easy. The vari­ety of spe­cif­ic func­tions to build and shape your design also makes the soft­ware feel very user-friend­ly. I will def­i­nite­ly con­tin­ue to use FreeCAD, I feel I’ve bare­ly scratched the sur­face and It’s already saved me mon­ey and allowed me to be more sus­tain­able in repair­ing some­thing rather than replac­ing it, I look for­ward to fur­ther devel­op­ing my skills and find­ing out what else it can do! ”