Low Cost and Free CAD
I visited the Avanquest warehouse recently and found a few copies of all sorts of packages that I can sell off for cost plus packaging. For the Mac versions I have a few 2D v2 that have come back from a shop, nothing wrong with them apart from a slightly squashed box, £20 each.
For the PC, I have quite a few training CDs written for v12, but would be a good start for use with any package, these I can give away with any purchase of TurboCAD.
TurboCAD Professional v11, Autodesk Inventor Plug-In, £10
TurboCAD Professional 12, just the disk, £50.
A TurboCAD Deluxe 12, £10
And a pile of Constraint Manager Training CDs free to anyone buying any professional version.
And completely off the CAD subject, I also came across a few versions of a remarkable piece of astronomy software called Starry Night. I’ve always been fascinated with astronomy and this package really brings the universe to life. I’ve got everything from one called Sky Explorer, which is a starter, for £20 up to the Pro Plus which retails at £180, but can let go for £60 and Pro that retails for £98, which I can post out for £45 – but I only have about a dozen. If you go to www.avanquest.co.uk, you can find more info on Starry Night
I want to start learning CAD. What software would you recommend? I want to use the one that is used the most in the industry. For example, Adobe Photoshop is the leading image editing software.
Cheers.
Dave
Statistics can be made to show just about anything. So take terms like ‘industry standard’ and ‘leading’ with a bucket of salt. What I can say with total confidence is:
1 TurboCAD is the biggest selling CAD system in retail in the world.
2 I sell at least one professional copy a week to a company who are fed up paying AutoCAD prices. 49 times out of 50 they discover that TurboCAD not only does all they need in a CAD package, but it will read and edit past drawings and save them a great deal of money.
3 I’ve recently sold into a company that was just about to buy a system from SolidWorks, saving them £6,000
4 Last month I sold to a man who was quoted over £10,000 by Autodesk, I saved him £8,000
5 At the end of last year a company bought a system from me for £2,000, £8,000 less than quoted by Autodesk.
What people find when they take the time to look at TurboCAD is that it is a very good CAD package at a reasonable price. And a lot of companies use it as their main package.
As I said to the man at a show this year who was about to buy AutoCAD LT to design a house extension. ‘If you want to throw your money away on a clumsy 2D package, then fine, it’s your money’. However if all you want to do is 2D, I can sell you a package for £30 which will do all you need to do. Unfortunately he thought that spending far more than he needed to would give him more – he was wrong.
Paul 01962 835 081