Software for creating rolling stock plans?

[Vince-RA]

A very, very long time ago I posted a thread on scratch building a flatcar. For whatever reason I've dusted off the modeling supplied recently and have tried to come up with a better way to produce plans to follow when building new flatcars. My originals were hand drawn, to 100% scale, but very crude. I've seen some great examples of more refined plans such as these from Chris Butler as well as those included in kits from LaBelle, etc. Chris Butler used CorelDraw, which is a little spendy for my tastes. I've done some work with InkScape (free, open source) which produces acceptable results given my limited talents (see below) but makes it very hard to produce 100% scale drawings which is what I'd really like to do. Any options out there better than InkScape? Tips on scaling that are better than setting object size to 3.345" x 0.080" (aka roughly 24'4" x 8" at HO scale)?

 

[ctclibby]

Vince: give FreeCad a look. Windows and Linux ports, I don't remember about Apple/Mac. I have been playing with it at it is not bad. Learning curve as always. Lots of help type stuff on the Internet and the forum has examples and tutitorials that you can wade through. Free stuff.

 

[Vince-RA]

Looks promising, thanks for the recommendation!

 

[MikeGTW]

Any cad program is going to have learning curve For free that InkScape is one of the better ones There's also one called Vectornator
I've used Corel since ver 3 was a beta tester for them for a while Ver 6 was not good at all They sent out free Ver 7 to anyone that complained Adobe even sent me a free Adobe Illustrator because of that I'm using ver X6 now and have Illustrator and Photoshop

Take a look at that Vectornator it looks like might be ok

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[747flier]

What I do is a little different, but the program can be used to output 2D. I use a free program called Design Spark Mechanical to do design for 3D printing (SLA) and mostly have been doing detailed ship models and parts, but lately have been printing HON3 rolling stock. This includes all those small pieces from hand wheels and on down to turnbuckles. I did print operable arch bar trucks and wheels, but due to the characteristics of the rain, the wheels roll but not with these of the commercial ones, too bad!

 

[747flier]

Maybe a little off topic, but an update: I recently designed Narrow Gauge passenger trucks which roll well indeed. The trick is very precise spacing of the axel pockets. These using the Kadee wheelsiets. I've loaded free cad, which does have a MAC version but not making a hard push on learning it so far.