ahh you wrote emachine!
e-machineshop works quite well and i find it to be very user friendly, give it a try if you have a pc.
emachineshop IS good. But all the pros are using Solidworks.
This thread is really long for a one - three question answer >_>
on the topic of solid works, it seems like overkill (the people of one drop agree) seeing as the only reason you would buy it rather than getting emachine is that it has a bunch of really cool tools that you would never find useful for yoyodesign.
YES!
Just throwing it out there, Blender is another free 3D-modeling software - while it’s really powerful (and probably overkill for designing yoyos), I’ve heard it’s not terribly beginner-friendly.
Frankly, I don’t really see what’s wrong with designing yoyos by hand… Give me a pencil, a ruler and some graph paper and I’m ready to go. Calculating weight could be a bit of an issue unless you’re good at calculus, but that’s what intuition and prototypes are for, right?
I use blender more than anyone else, and it may be amazing, but it doesn’t work for designing yo-yos. only concepts and stuff. Because it is polygon based rather than vector it can’t be read by machines and such. It’s amazing for anything other than design though, it is by far my favorite piece of 3d software.
having vector based CAD software is pretty necessary, otherwise the machines have nothing to read.
Hi all new to this place.
I can give you my 2 cents.
My 9 year old want to have me make a few yoyo’s for him i have a cnc lath and cnc mills and the program I use is Pro engineer.
Higher end than solid works.
Not over kill if you are trully going to make many designs and many changes.
My background is building and designinf the predator uav’s With out a program that you can changes quickly and easily you will spend more time redrawing than making the parts.
Honestly I can help you if you need cad work or just some helpful advice about design and production.
I can draw a yoyo in pro E in about 3 min. in 3D and know the total weight given the material weight.
That what a good program will do for you.
Pm me and we can talk.
Cheers