I have been using CAD (Computer Aided Design) software for fifty years. Let me repeat that: I have been using CAD for 50 years. My first job out of college was at Martin Marietta Aerospace (now Lockheed-Martin) in Orlando. I think they had almost 2,000 engineers working there. Most of the drafting was done by entry level engineers like me so maybe 25% or about 500 engineers were on drafting boards. They had just started using CADAM and I was one of a couple dozen chosen to train on it and test it. When I started, they only had three dumb terminals connected to an IBM 370 main frame computer. They added three more later and we had to schedule our time in advance. Martin Marietta Information Services charged Martin Marietta Aerospace $50 per hour to be logged into the terminal. It was strictly a 2D drafting program and really wasn’t that useful for design work but it was state of the art at the time.

Most of the CAD programs I have used have been for the Macintosh. The first was MacDraw from Apple which was available in late 1984. It cost $200 and was more powerful than the CADAM software I had used just seven years earlier. But is was still just a 2D program and did not have many of the built in functions an engineer would need. Just a year later, MacDraft was introduced and was a true 2D drafting program which was a pretty big improvement and only cost about $250. In early 1988. I had a brief bout with Windows CAD software called CADKEY. It was clunky and cumbersome.

In 1988, I bought Universal Gear Corporation now SIP Corporation and the next year, Apple came out with a serious CAD program called Claris CAD. I did all of my early SIP design work with that and still have many of the files. But by 1993, everything was going 3D and Apple wasn’t interested in that market so they discontinued Claris CAD but negotiated a sweetheart upgrade deal with Ashlar Vellum. This was my first try at 3D CAD and the software retailed for about $2,000, not cheap. It had one major flaw. It modeled surfaces not solids which meant it could not do engineering calculations like volume, mass and center of gravity; and it could only do line drawings.

In 1994 I was designing our first all new grinder in 30 years, the Peerless 2000. I did my research and purchased MiniCad for about $800. It was the premiere CAD software for Mac. I did look at AutoCad for Mac but it was awful and later discontinued. MiniCad was replaced with Vectorworks which was a major upgrade. I have been using it ever since, some 32 years. Until now.

About 10 years ago, they began specializing in architecture and theater. Mechanical design became the red headed step child and was neglected. Most other mechanical design CAD software developed the ability to model motion and interaction. From that, you could create animations of your project. It was also becoming a little buggy. I put up with these limitation because I had so much invested and CAD software is different in that you can’t easily convert a document or file from one format to another because they all take different approaches to creating 3D models. Then, a couple of months ago, every big assembly file I opened, crashed immediately when I tried to render the model. This even happened to files on which I had made no changes and which worked perfectly fine before. I contacted Vectorworks with a crash report and sent them the problem files. I did not hear anything back. The program was unusable and I was in the middle of creating all of the new exploded views for the new Peerless 7000C and 7000S. I was actually starting to panic a little.

I started looking at alternatives and the two big companies are AutoCad and Solidworks. Karl, my son who will eventually be taking over the engineering duties, had used Solidworks in college and really liked it. He said it was very intuitive. Alas, they do not make a version for Macintosh. AutoCad for mac still does not have a good reputation but they make a relatively new, from the ground up program call Fusion. It gets rave reviews and was developed from scratch for both Windows and Mac. I downloaded a trial version and realized that there would be a steep learning curve for me but that it seemed to have all of the features I wanted. I would just have to learn how to find them. On the plus side, it uses the same basic concept of modeling that Solidworks uses so Karl should have little trouble getting up to speed on it. I went ahead and subscribed to it for about $2,000 per year. The base version is only about $600 per year but I need the added sophistication of the mechanical design version. I have been using it for about 3 weeks and while the learning curve is steep. It is not as bad as I had feared. I am actually learning how to use it. Fusion will make the 9th CAD software in fifty years that I have had to learn how to use. I guess I still have a few tricks left in me.