A good FreeCAD tutorial

I’ve started playing with FreeCAD and I was struggling to find a video tutorial on YouTube which was up to date with the latest version released last month.

I ended up going with this online tutorial which I felt like taught me the basics of designing a part:

https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Basic_Part_Design_Tutorial

Can anyone recommend one for creating an assembly?

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My favourite is the guy with the huge fishing lure in the background :slight_smile: https://www.youtube.com/user/sliptonic/videos

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I am at a very similar place. Some of the older tutorials use something called an addon module or an extension module.

My best understanding so-far is that the assembly functions are dispersed throughout other modules.

You have a construction stack that goes (bottom to top) Sketch=>Body=>Part. At the “Body” level, you can create a “Clone”, which allows you to reference one Body multiple times. All "Clone"s update when the original is updated; this is important if you wish to have some flexibility in your model. Once you get to the part level, you need to position them relative to all other parts. That is as far as I am currently.

I haven’t found any good tutorials, but I will post if I do.

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This one is pretty good.

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I also just learned one tip from a previous tutorial. The bodies being assembled need to be free of dependencies. That means you need to create either a Clone, or a Cheap Copy of a body in order to assemble it. It could be a pretty frustrating if you try to align two bodies with dependencies.

Here is the tutorial:

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Those were both excellent tutorials, thanks @Joshua…have you used either technique? What are your thoughts on them?

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I started with the first, Edit=>Assembly. It is good, but a little clunky. The second is more natural and has more options. It appears the second is the way the software was intended to be used. I had a hard time finding it at first, primarily because it is under the “Draft” workbench. For some reason I had it in my head that drafting meant 2D drawing. Nonetheless, the “Draft” workbench is where the assembly tools are located.

So far, it works well enough. The snap (hold down shift or ctrl) function was necessary to successfully align one part, which was a small hurdle. I have been able to successfully move through my first project. I am getting better and faster by the hour.

There are several keyboard shortcuts which can aid productivity. If you use it enough to remember those shortcuts, you will be much more productive.

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I have a question. I am trying to use the FreeCAD Paths Workbench to export the gcode. I am able to create a job and generate the code to cut one part at a time. Does anyone know how to generate the gcode to cut multiple parts at the same time?

Thanks,

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I watched a shorter tutorial form this person last night and I have been working on getting through this much longer tutorial today. So far I have been really happy with the way the person explains things and I find it easy to follow. This is also for FreeCAD 0.18 which is the most current version at he time of posting this. The person doing the video talks pretty slow, but I don’t mind that.

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I’m new to CAD so gave the tutorial a try from OP and it was very helpful. Decided to try modeling the receiver for my gaming headset for practice but can’t figure out how to create a “bend” (I circled the part of model I’m trying to bend)
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Currently just have two cylinders going vertical for the circled part. Anyone know which function this would take and/or a tutorial showing how?

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