Hi all.

From browsing the forum I know a few of you have tried or are using the free DesignSpark-Mechanical.

I'm brand new to 3-D printing (my Wanhao Duplicator I3 is en route at the moment) and I have no experience with 3-D design.

So I'm looking for a free or cheap design package that is fairly simple to come to grips with and that I don't have to be an engineer to use.

I've looked at several of the DesignSpark-Mechanical tutorials and I like the way you start off with a 2-D drawing then convert it to 3-D for further development.

Would appreciate some experienced opinions before I put time into it.

I know this thread is fairly old, but I just joined the forum and thought I'd offer my two sense.

I'm also new to 3D printers, although I've had a QUBD Two Up (the orginal version), for just over a year. I don't personally recommend it, unless you really want to tinker. The newer versions might be better though. I wanted to design a few parts for it, as opposed to just searching through Thinigverse and grabbing parts here and there. I wanted to make this printer my own. I stumbled across DesignSpark Mechanical, and I've mainly used that. I haven't done too much with it, but I have designed functional upgrades with it, such as a pulley system that gets rid of the X-gantry sag. I don't come from an engineering/designer background, I'm studying computer programming, so it was a new experience. I recommend it for learning purposes, and small things. If you want to design things that have more curves, and are more organic, rather then machanical in nature, find a different software, otherwise, try this one out. It's free, so only your time will be used up if you don't like it.

I have recently started trying out Onshape. It's web based, works well on tablets, free for personal use (Limited to 10 Private Documents) and exports to more formats than DesignSpark including PARASOLID, ACIS, STEP, IGES, SOLIDWORKS, and STL. It seems pretty powerful, the only real issue I have encountered so far is it takes a long time to load a model particularly complex models.