after bashing my head in my table for a bit, i finally managed to make something “salvagable”… i think.
this is meant to be a vesa adapter, from 200mm to 100mm; the idea is that 6mm metal screw-posts are melted into the holes
the sketch is quite a bit of a hellscape… i will see if i can figure out symmetry on the next iteration. Do you have any advice on how i can use better this program? it’s been quite a bit since i haven’t seen such a steep learning curve on a piece of software
The sketch is a sketch and not a blueprint or engineering diagram so don’t worry about how a screenshot looks. (It looks fine and I can almost read it, FWIW.)
My advice is just general advice for parametric CAD. It’s hard to learn, but so awesome to use.
Get a good set of calipers and reverse engineer everything you see. If something seems super awkward to make and you feel like you are building a domino tower, stop and attack the problems from a different angle.
Fully constrained sketches are super important at first. Constrain everything until you learn what bits need to be adjusted later. The goal is to build solid components that can be adjusted later while they are part of a much larger assembly. I have a subset of “stock” components that I share across my models. If I change one measurement in a core component, all the other models that use it are adjusted almost automatically. That might just be for Fusion 360 though, but it shows the power of understanding constraints and how they trickle up through your projects. If my sketches weren’t constrained correctly, the results may be wildly unpredictable further down the workflow.
I have been working seriously in CAD for about 5 years after I decided it was going to be my pandemic project. TBH, I still don’t know everything and probably never will.