CAD TUTORIAL : FreeCAD Beginner [EASY GUIDE]

hey guys if you know nothing at all about freak head but you want to then hopefully you're in the right place probably like me you enjoy making things and today we're going to do just that we're going to make this simple phone holder by designing the 3d print within freecad now today i'm not going to worry about the nice it is a freecad instead we're going to dive straight in and make something we'll worry about what knob does what later on right now we're going to give you the confidence to tackle this amazingly versatile free package and actually make something tangible i'm assuming you visited freecad.org downloaded the software installed it opened it and are looking at the same screen as we're looking at now and the first thing you're thinking is ah and that's okay don't worry about it there's loads of things going on here and we really don't care not today anyway we're going straight up to the top here where it says start and clicking this reveals a list of workbenches and we'll discuss these another day for now all we're looking for is part design because we're going to design a part so we'll click part design and nothing much happens except this area turns blue so what we do now is use this great big plus button and we'll click create new click and nothing much happens except this area turns blue but over on the left underneath tasks it says create a body so we'll click that and now it says create a sketch so we'll click that and now we have this strange and matrix looking thing which is our three-dimensional world the space where we can actually build anything we like now if you come to the top right corner we can see this cube this handy control helps us orientate our 3d world and clicking these arrows will help us rotate our planes if this is unfamiliar to you again don't worry about it instead just keep clicking until you find the right plane which is the one we'll use today and you'll see our little matrix thingy now says y z plane and that's perfect so we just need to click on this matrix thingy until it turns green and now we head over to the left and we click ok we're now in the sketch area before we can make a three-dimensional object we have to make a two-dimensional sketch which is what we're going to do right now but before we do anything here there's a very important tip i'd like to give you because we can draw anywhere in our three-dimensional space it's possible to get lost especially if we're joining two or more parts together so we want a reference point to measure everything from and that's this point here this central dot if that doesn't make much sense then again just trust me always begin your sketches from this point we'll start by drawing a line and you can select this little line tool icon up here on the toolbar or you might prefer the keyboard shortcut l l for line so i'll click l and we can see that the cursor has changed to show us that the line tool has been selected so with my line tool activated i'll hover over the point until it turns yellow and click now as i move the mouse outwards freecad starts to draw a line and whenever i click the line will end so i'm going to draw all the way over here and please if you're following along do exactly the same as me so nice and far over here on the right making sure that the line is yellow and click we've drawn our first line a useful feature of freecad is that once the tool is selected it stays selected until another tool is chosen or the current tool is released by clicking escape so if i click here and here i get a line or here and here or here and here because the line tool remains active until deselected but i don't want these lines so i'm going to undo those and i'll use the fairly universal keyboard shortcut of control and zed or ctrl and z to our american friends now we're actually trying to draw the side profile of our phone holder and as you can see it's basically an equilateral triangle so returning to our sketch i'll draw a diagonal line hovering over the center point until it turns yellow and click now come up over here somewhere and click now that's pretty rubbish if my maths teacher was right an equilateral triangle should have an angle of 60 degrees and that's nothing like 60. so what we need to do now is constrain this line and force it to an angle of 60 degrees and we can do this by using constraints whoa look at the way i seamlessly flowed into that constraints are exactly what they sound like they are functions or rules that force lines curves distances etc to do exactly what we tell them to do and if on the toolbar we click our mouse here we can see a whole bunch of constraints and the one we're looking for is this one the one that looks like the letter a after it's had a bit too much to drink so i'll click it and now i'll click this line and this line and freecad says hey what angle do you want and i'll enter and look at that now we have a perfect 60 degree angle to this diagonal line coming back to our phone holder this side has a length of 75 millimeters and we need to apply that same dimension to our sketch now it's worth saying if you prefer to work in inches freecad will allow you to change your unit preferences but we've ignored all that here today we're using freecad literally as it comes out of the box anyway there's a few ways of adding dimensions within pre-cad and if we access the constraints on the toolbar this double-headed arrow distance constraint is my preference so i'll click this and it wants to select two points so i'll click that point there and i'll click that point there and freecad says what size do you want and i'll type in 75 and enter and here we have a 75 millimeter line which we can't see thank you freecad so if we move the scroll wheel on our mouse one way we zoom in and if we scroll the other way we zoom out if we click and hold that same scroll wheel we can drag our sketch wherever we want to seeing these measurements is useful but they can get in the way of our sketch which is annoying so if i click escape to deselect at all and return to the usual mouse pointer i can click on the measurement it changes color and i can drag it anywhere i want on the page now then as our triangle is missing a third side i'll click l for the line tool and i'll click this top point here and you might think i'm going to join up at the bottom but actually i'm going to shoot a little past this and again if you're following along please make sure you do exactly the same as i do it will all make sense in the end so is this top angle 60 degrees well it might be pretty close but we want it to be exact so i'll head up to our constraints and i'll click on the drunken a angle constraint we'll click that line and that line and enter 60. looking at the profile of our model for a moment we need to represent the thickness of these walls so i'll click l for my line tool and add in three lines now this is quite important if i zoom in here do you see the little red dash well freecad is pretty clever it always tries to draw horizontal and perpendicular lines where he can and here it's assumed that my bottom line was supposed to be parallel with the one beneath it and that's what this little parallel symbol is telling us however this line doesn't look parallel with this one nor do these two look parallel and of course we need them to be parallel so i'll head up to our constraints and this is the one we need these two lines one slightly bigger than the other so i'll click that then i'll click the line i want to alter and then i'll click the one i'm comparing it to now look at that it's nice and parallel something has gone wrong up here but let's ignore that for a moment and make our other lines parallel like this zooming in on our little problem area we can see that everything has come apart and things are always coming apart in free cad which is why they've made sure this constraint is so accessible it looks a little like a point having a panic attack doesn't it now this constraint bonds points firmly together so let's give it a click and then click here and click here and now they've joined if we look down the bottom here and zoom in we have the same problem so click click and it's sorted we now need to apply a thickness to these interior walls and we want them all to be the same and we can control this with our distance constraint the double headed arrow now this does like to work on two points but it will also work on a point and a line like this it's asking for a distance and we'll say five millimeters we can use the same point again on this side and again go with five millimeters but oh look at this mess our inside is now on the outside but don't panic we can easily pull that back i'll click escape to exit the distance constraint and i'll just click and drag this point here pulling the line back where it belongs now we can use our distance constraint again and there we go things turn green in freecad when they are properly constrained and fixed firmly into our three-dimensional space which is a good thing to achieve but we're not going to worry too much about that here today looking at our model again we need to add this shelf that supports the mobile phone and i'm going to very crudely draw this in using the line tool utter rubbish it looks like it was built by my brother-in-law but that doesn't matter because we can easily sort this out what we want is for this line to be nice and perpendicular with this line so this angle is 90 degrees and you've guessed it there's a constraint for that so we'll go up here and there's this t which we can think of as a t square that's our starting line click and that's the one we want to change click and look at that very nice so we can pretty much apply the same constraint all around here but once again freak has fallen apart on us so let's use the easy access panicking point the joining constraint and cement things back together and that's not looking bad at all all except this line here we could correct this with the same t-square perpendicular constraint or we could vary life a bit and use the parallel constraint so the shelf looks better but it's clear the walls aren't the same thickness as our triangle so we'll click on the distance constraint and fix them our phone will sit on the shelf here and this lip will keep it safe but it doesn't need to be too tall so let's make it five millimeters again because i have no imagination i've already measured the thickness of my mobile phone and you might want to do the same with yours but for me 10 millimeters will be ample with a little wiggle room to spare it looks a bit of a mess with all these red lines so i'll click escape then clear and drag these measurements out of the way if i grab and pull this point here the shelf moves up and down like it's on rails it can't move in any other direction because we fix things with constraints so we need to decide a height measurement for our shelf using the distance constraint and i'm going to go with 10 millimeters and that's looking pretty good but i want to make it even prettier so i'm going to add a fill it into these two corners on the toolbar we'll find these filleting tools and i'm going to choose the second one the constraint fill it then click this line and this line that looks nice but it could be better so i'll constrain the distance of the fillet from point to point and i think i'll go with 25 millimeters yes i like that so let's put one at the top as well so it's constrained fill it click and click now the distance constraint of 25 millimeters of course we don't have affiliates at the bottom right corner as our design calls for this to be open so to finish it off i want a temporary line from this point downwards but i want this line to be perpendicular so we'll use the t-square looking perpendicular constraint from here like this it's looking pretty messy here now with all these strain lines going everywhere and i want to get rid of some of these so i'll use the trim tool which is this one here so watch this there and again and again and yes things are turning green and then not green and again please don't worry about this today we need this line to be all the way over here so i'll escape the selected tool and try to drag it but look what happens i'll quickly undo that however there's nothing stopping us from using the line tool and extending it that way i'll use the trim tool again to tidy things up starting with this bit now at a quick glance that looks like the side profile of our phone holder and you might think we're finished actually we're not but for the moment we'll pretend we are so on the left side here i'll click update which doesn't always do anything but it's a good habit to get into now and then we'll click close and of course good old free cad is obscuring our view a bit so i'll press and hold the mouse scroll wheel and drag everything into view the shape looks almost perfect but if we look here i pretended to forget to trim this line and the reason i did this was to show you that you can come in and out of the sketch environment without fear of ruining anything on the left here where it says combo view we click the model tab and we can then see on this list the word sketch so let's double click that and here we are back in our sketching environment i'll select the trim tool and remove this tiny line now once again we'll click update for good practice and finally close so here's a finished two-dimensional shape which we can now make into a three-dimensional shape to do this we'll head over to the left again to the combo view section and we'll click this tasks tab as the name suggests this shows us a list of tasks which we can now apply to our sketch now you might be expecting me to extrude this especially if you're familiar with fusion 360 but no freecad does have an extrude function and we may cover that in another tutorial but for today what we're looking for is pad so if i click pad we'll see our sketch has turned grey well actually it's done a little more than that if i rotate this sketch by holding down shift and the right mouse button i can pan slightly you can see that we have a 3d shape freecad has automatically created it with a depth of 10 millimeters as we can see over here so what we can do is change this value to one of our choosing which for me is 75 millimeters and look at that that's almost a finished phone holder but i want to do a couple more things to really pretty this up i'm going to come down to this very back bottom edge and click it now in the task bar on the left freecad has given us a list of some things we can do to this selected area and i'm going to click the create a datum plane this will add a plane that physically touches the selected face i'll click ok because i'm happy with that and now i'll click the plane itself turning it green looking at our taskbar again we have the option to create a sketch and that's what i'm going to do and 3 cat turns our world upside down again so i'll mess with these arrows to correct our orientation and i'm now looking at the rear from the proper angle something that always brings me pleasure but we'll just double check by holding shift and the right mouse button together and panning a little and yes we're where we need to be now i'll zoom in a bit using the scroll wheel and i want to draw some temporary construction lines so press l and begin at the center point like we always should i'll extend the line all the way over here making sure it stays yellow now i need an exact length to this line i want it to be half of the full length which as you recall is 75 millimeters and because i'm terrible at maths i'll have precant do the work for me so i'll enter 75 divided by 2 and enter and there we go freecads worked it out correctly now i need a perpendicular line from this point so i'll deliberately make this a little crooked so i can select the perpendicular constraint tool and make it perfect like that now we have a very aesthetically pleasing hole passing through our phone holder so on our toolbar we'll select the slot sketch tool and we'll come over onto our vertical line anywhere as long as the line stays yellow and click then we'll move outwards and click again creating something a bit messy but don't worry we can soon fix that we'll use our distance constraint again and give this slot a width of 25 millimeters for the height we're going to be artistic forget the maths and go with the flow for a moment so we'll click escape to free up our mouse pointer and then drag down look carefully in the background and you can see the shape of the holder so we want to keep a reasonable distance from the top edge like that and this is the bottom edge so we've got to allow for the thickness of the floor and just drag until we think it looks good now we can get rid of our lines and we'll use the trim tool again like this but watch what happens now freecad throws up an error message which actually contains some words in english though not necessarily in an order that we can understand but the gist of it is this you can't trim something that doesn't extend beyond two points but luckily we can delete it so i'll just close the judgmental error box and click our line once turning it green and now i'll click the delete button on my keyboard now i'll do the same again with a click and delete don't touch this slot again at this point as we've removed all the constraints that were holding it in place something that we really shouldn't do but today who cares right and we'll click update and close we can see our slot is green and under tasks we have a list of things we can do now you might expect us to use pad again and cut a hole but no this is pre-cad and it has a dedicated function called pocket so we'll click pocket and look there's already a bit of a hole for me in our holder we can see on the left the pocket is automatically millimeters deep so if we increase it we can see the hole getting deeper and i'm not going to worry about maths here i'll just keep clicking until the hole is way through the other side like that using shift and the right mouse button i can clumsily pan around and things are looking pretty good this datum plane is spoiling our view so on the left side here we'll click model and amongst this list we can see datum plane if i click it we'll see that it turns green if i hit the spacebar on the keyboard it becomes invisible click spacebar on it's back click spacebar and it's gone again and that's a useful keyboard shortcut for you to remember that leaves our 3d model looking great in fact all i want to do now is add a few fillets to soften these edges now if i click this edge here it selects but if i click this edge here it becomes obvious that we can only select one edge at a time but if we hold down the control button and click we can select multiple edges like this releasing the control key a moment i'll hold shift and right mouse button to pan our object around like so now holding down control i can select more edges if we look to the left and click the task tab amongst the list of things we can do is fill it so i'll click that and look freecad has automatically applied affiliate of one millimeter but i'm going to change that figure to 1.5 millimeters and finally we finished our first 3d creation in freecad all we need to do now is export this as a printable file on the left we'll click the model tab now we just click body once and our 3d model turns green at the top of the page click file and choose export now we can export in a variety of formats but here i'd recommend stl and save this somewhere on your pc and here it is a finished printable 3d model designed exclusively in freecad and thankfully it's the end of an epic tutorial now this isn't a perfect tutorial it was very rough and ready and a lot of important steps were deliberately missed out to keep things basic but doable so those points and more will need to be revisited in another tutorial but hopefully today you've gained enough insight and confidence to follow this video through and then have a go at creating a few things of your own but for now that's it so take care guys and thanks for watching

Channel: VogMan

Views: 125,519

Keywords: cad cam tutorial, freecad, cad, auto cad, cad design, free cad tutorial, cad tutorial, cad tutorial 3d, tutorial, beginner, easy, phone holder, stl, 3d print, vog, vegoilguy, complete, absolute

Id: 1QNVyMBV0fM

Length: 26min 7sec (1567 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022