My 1st 3D printed part....

[LittleWatchShop]

4 hours ago, JohnR725 said:

So I've downloaded the newest version

@JohnR725, FreeCAD seemed daunting to me at first, but after watching a few youtube videos, I was very comfortable with making some simple things.  I continued to learn to do more complex models.  Nothing I do even now is very complex, so I am in no way an expert.  But I have made many many useful things even with basic skills. 

Start with Part or Part Design workbenches. 

[jdm]

I didn't watched any video nor read anything before using  FreeCAD except that normally one starts with Part workksheet. The reason why I didn't is because in a previous experience with DraftSight these would not get straight the point (at least not the point I needed) and were boring to follow. I just searched for a couple of keywords and after reading few posting on their forum I got the answers I was looking for.

So for the thingie In my picture above I used Polyline to sketch one half of it with some approximate dimensions. Then I found that with Constraints you can set dimensions and other fundamental properties of your lines,circles, etc. All approachable, logical stuff. Once happy with that I found another workesheet to mirror it, but since the contour was not perfectly closed no surface was automatically created, I wandered around that for a bit and as soon I corrected that the surface was made, holes and all. So I went to extrude and meshing which are again separate worksheets.

During all that the program crashed hard only once, plus some recoverable exception messages on console. It is not stellar software but I like it better that having to do with Autodesk in any form.

Each worksheet step and (optionally) its successive modifications is saved separately in the same project, so if you have to go back making changes then is quick to repeat the building chain for a mechanical object. There is a plug-in to produce printable files but I just used Cura instead. 

[LittleWatchShop]

13 minutes ago, jdm said:

Each worksheet step and (optionally) its successive modifications is saved separately in the same project

Indeed...very important