Boosted Falcon

Just wondering if anyone has any info on any cad tafe courses offered in melb?
Im able to do full time study on my disabilty, so i thought id try take advantage of that fact and do some study.

Try RMIT (tafe)
im currently studying Engineering at RMIT and in the course we do Autocad, solidworks and Catia.
Autocad is 2D as you know aswell as 3D, solidworks and catia are mostly 3D and its pretty good and interesting

yeah ill do a basics course first which is 2d then a drafting course. if i wanna do 3d after that i'll look into it.

Yeaa cool cool

What are you planning on doing, engineering or drafting buildings etc?

I completed my 3 year course at NMIT (preston) doing building design. Pretty good at ArchiCAD but we also touched base on autocad and revit. In my opinion archicad is the shit!, autocad is good for all your engineering and shit but when it comes to drafting for residential and commercial buildings look no further then archicad.

Pretty sure there a short course in each of the CAD programs which usually takes 1 week and gives you a good run down on how each programs works. (its in box hill)

im doing autocad because my brother owns a truck accessory fitting business and he gets a few bits and pieces laser cut, usually bits of stainless for like truck hoods or sun visor etc.
the place he gets the cutting done uses autocad apparently.

come to think of it, does it matter which program is used to make the file?
if a drawing is done in one program can it be opened in another?

im just keen to get some training in the program so i can make up my own stuff like turbo flanges, head flanges and other random shit.
id also like to have some training so i can look at doing some part time or casual work in the automotive field, whatever that may be.

im pretty much just gonna get the courses under my belt and see where life takes me
i cant work at all at the moment so learning a new skill beats doing nothing at home. im allowed to work up to 14 hours a week, so employment with this new skill isn't out of the question.

if anyone that has done the courses or is/has been employed to do CAD work in any field has any info, suggestions or even opinions on anything at all, please chime in. i'd love to hear from you.

Paging glenneaux. Glenneaux to General Discussion.

Swinny does short CAD courses, I went through a series of classes over several weeks (once a week I think for 12 weeks?) back in my council days a few years ago.

I done a TAFE Mechatronics course, Advanced Diploma? when I completed school (years ago).
Was an interesting course. And opened the doors for a wide range of career paths.
It had manual drafting, cad 2d, cad 3d, hydraulics, pneumatics, welding, lathe, mill, electronics, robotics, electrical fundamentals, strength of materials, materials science, statics etc and OH&S of course. Took a year full time but was well worth it. Basically a snapshot of all the engineering degrees, bit of everything but with some fitting & turning thrown in.

I do solidworks at work and in my own time for personal stuff im pretty much self taught learnt a few things off people i work with.

I wouldnt call solidworks just 3d very easy to do 2d in which most of your basic designs start off in anyway.

Almost all cad software will save/export to DXF or DWG file extension which is what laser cutter's use

Are there any decent free autocad program's out there? I'm looking at having a go at trying to learn how to use to it.

Sketchup might give you a basic idea at CAD


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OED666 wrote:Are there any decent free autocad program's out there? I'm looking at having a go at trying to learn how to use to it.

I wouldn't mention looking at TPB, because I definitely don't download things illegally. It's only $5,990 a licence anyways.

Alternatively, enrol in the right CAD course and drop it by the census date. Depending on the institution, students get free Autodesk licences that as far as I know last 24 months, or the duration of the course.

As similar as you would think they are, I'd start learning the one you think you'd like to master. I learnt with Autocad, and all other non-autodesk CAD software feels foreign to me and is extremely frustrating to use. Conversely, I know others who have started with Microstation and hate using Autocad.

I don't know if I'd recommend taking a course on AutoCAD to actually learn it, I believe it's something you pick up with practice. You can learn the basics from the course, but they would only take you a few hours. The stuff you get taught is more around setting up drawings, using layouts, blocks and all the type of things you'd use in an office when aiming for efficiency. The more interesting stuff you can learn on the fly. If you don't know how to do something, you just play around with it until it works (or google it) and then you know for next time. Our Year 11 work experience kids can generally pump out a few pretty decent drawings in a day having never used autocad before.

EDIT:
Basis of comments: I use AutoCAD on average 6 hours a day as a design engineer. I use CivilCAD (non-autodesk) as little as possible but it's the design package we have that interfaces with our survey equipment. I have previously used Civil3D, Microstation, Solidworks and old-school Mechanical Desktop in limited capacity.