(In Blender it'd look like this).

(... and in FreeCAD ehhh)

I am on the autistic spectrum, 81 years old, but I started with computers in 1959, so I am, as they say, an old hand.

Some of my friends here convinced me to try Fusion 360. I have tried that product and almost every other at least once in the last 5 or so years with NO understanding (grock for Heinlein fans) happening.

My good frenemy @davee pointed me at a YouTube 36-part Fusion 360 course by Paul McWhorter. For several reasons, I had looked at a few of his videos on other subjects before, which were not to my taste. Dave knows me at least a bit, and I think he understands some of my strengths and weaknesses, so he insisted that I would 'get it.' He said to start at episode 4, as the first 3 were about setting up a 3D printer. Long story short, I was indeed able to grock the 2D basics by episode 7, if not earlier. I am now 99.999% sure I will master this CAD at least well enough for most of my needs and will have a handful of members here to assist if not PM himself.

I was watching a YT video on other beginner CAD programs this morning and noticed that almost all of them were, in fact, harder to use than Fusion 360. One program in particular did NOT even have a filet or chamfer tool.

More soon.

Maybe others can bee recommended ?

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Any ideas on what it is? ;-)

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Using the boolean modifier I combined a cylinder with a torus. To make the tread I made up two cutting tools. The cutting of the transverse pieces was quite repetitive. Rotate the wheel though 15° then use modifier/boolean/apply and repeat another 23 times.

I was wondering if this process could be automated/scripted. Despite having no Applescript library, my guess is that I could pass the necessary keystrokes with Applescript to rotate the wheel but the rest is achieved with mouse clicks.

For anybody like me, just starting, the workspace and menus are awe-inspiring. There are so many possibilities including those where you can wrong. So I thought I would list, what I think are the most important first steps.

1. Creating basic objects: With Add/Mesh, choose basic shape objects, then staying in "Object Mode", manipulate size, position and rotation. Get used to using the "x" shortcut key to delete objects.
2. Learn to use the 3D cursor in conjunction with the object's origin (small orange coloured point inside the object). You'll be using Object/Set Origin quite a lot, get yourself acquainted with that menus possibilities. The most useful shortcut key here is "shift-c" to return the 3D cursor to the centre of the scene.
3. As we don't really need fancy shapes or surfaces for engineering purposes, the first modifier that I found useful was the "Boolean" modifier, to add or subtract volume from another object. I don't know where these Dutch guys got their terminology from but "different" means subtract from the main object, "union" means add to the main object and intersect means delete everything the two objects don't have in common.

The picture below shows this effect.

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The base object is the cube and the cylinder used to modify the shape of the cube. The rightmost figure was created by resizing the cylinder length and diameter, placing the cylinder inside the cube and using Boolean/different, then flipping the cylinder through 90° in the horizontal axis and repeating Boolean/different and then again after flipping 90° in the vertical. The middle object used the same procedure as above but using Boolean/union before hitting the Apply key. The leftmost object was simply made by placing the cylinder vertically inside the cube and choosing Boolean/intersect.

Thanks