ORIGINAL: fockewulf37
Sorry...
Ty
No apology necessary Ty. I recommend Compufoil every chance I get as well as it can do in 2 minutes what may take 2 hours in a CAD program. Your Halifax is a tremendous project by the way, simply awesome.
ORIGINAL: SMUGator
I do appreciate the inputs on this. I've been watching Chad's work on the [link=http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/m_7335038/tm.htm]1/6 Scale F4U Corsair Group Build[/link] and thinking to myself that I need to learn to do this. I'm very computer literate, but my impression is that Autocad is pretty expensive and that the learning curve is pretty steep for casual/occasional users. So I'm very interested to hear what alternatives are out there to apply to the hobby.
Tom
It's not as difficult as you might imagine Tom. If you have the knowledge and experience to design an airplane then figuring out how to draw it in a CAD program is relatively simple. Although I've been using CAD on a daily basis for 8 or so years I have never taken any courses on it. I can tell you without hesitation that I've learned substantially more about CAD by designing airplanes with it than I have at work! The most important thing is the desire to learn it. I was already drawing airplane plans anyway, using the old fashioned method. When I was introduced to CAD it became obvious that I could draw those plans much faster and more accurate with a computer and that was all the incentive I needed to learn CAD!
PS - The method shown here for lofting can be done with a pencil and paper as well. The CAD program does not make one a better engineer, it's simply a tool like any other. Often CAD just allows bad designers to turn out bad designs at a much faster rate!
