Supermotive
Member
I agree. I was just talking to one of my co-workers about a cad software. Fortunately my kid does not wake up before 8am. Cheers.Quote: I am still working with rough sketches. Having a toddler and an infant can really cut into my design time /Quote
Toddlers are demanding! At that age my son woke up at 4 in the morning for quite some time and of course we didn't want to let him alone... my wife and I worked morning shifts .... which eventually payed off... but yes, it's very demanding..;-)
Apart from that you might want to consider using a CAD program for the design, once you get beyond rough sketches. This offers the advantage that you can later on let the program calculate the correct length of all the truss members and export the data to a Finite Element Program to check the strength of your design. In your sketch there are members of very unequal length and diameter. To me it looks as if currently the distribution of tube diameters is not really consistent. You will have to design for maximum compression load on the members because in a truss compression buckling is the limiting factor, if you are not 100% sure about load magnitudes and directions. The tube at the rear of the pilot seat has a large diameter but does it really see a much larger compression load than the diagonal member we've been discussing before and wich is almost of equal length? Any design from scratch involves a lot of detail calculation. Hope your kid doesn't wake up early....
PS: I have tested FreeCad with the line plug in and I think it would be up to the job, but you have a lot of open source programs to choose from (and perhaps one you have access to anyway?)