FreeCAD for Beginners

Version: 2021-02-22

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Introduction

I am using FreeCAD Version: 0.19 for Windows 64bit. 0.19 is recommended by most FreeCAD
contributors and developers recommend. Download it from here
https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/releases/tag/0.19_pre and follow the installation as
mentioned on the same page.

When you open FreeCAD, it defaults to a ‘start’ workbench which has limited tools but shows
recent files and example files in the viewer window on the right-hand side.

FreeCAD uses ‘workbenches’ which you can switch between. If you click the drop-down menu
where it says ‘Start’, you will see all the installed workbenches.

The idea of workbenches is simple: imagine a large workshop with multiple benches, and each
bench has a different collection of tools focused around a theme. FreeCAD has workbenches
with tools to make parts, create architecture, assemble collections of parts into assemblies,
create toolpaths for CNC, create technical drawings, and much more.
The beauty of these workbenches is that FreeCAD automatically carries all your work between
them when you switch benches. As you progress in FreeCAD, you will use more workbenches,
and you might even install extra workbenches you discover in the FreeCAD community.

Going from Fusion360 to FreeCAD?

Watch this 10-minute video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GxJkB23ZHM

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First Design using Part workbench

To begin, click ‘Create new’ and the document viewer window will create an empty project in a
new tab. Next, you are going to switch from the ‘start’ workbench to the ‘part’ workbench
using the workbench drop-down menu. The part workbench is a good place to start to get
oriented and to explore one of the simplest ways to make parts. Before you go too far, though,
let’s explore how you navigate, zooming and moving objects, in the preview window.
You should be able to see a collection of tool icons that contain yellow shapes of a cube,
cylinder, sphere etc. Left-click on the cylinder icon and you should see a cylinder appear in the
viewer window. It probably will have defaulted to a top view of the cylinder, so you may only
see a circle as you are looking straight down from above. There are numerous ways to switch
the viewpoint in FreeCAD. First, you can use the cube in the upper right-hand side of the
preview window to move to view different faces. You can also use the blue ‘view’ icons that
appear as a cube with a single face marked as solid in the toolbars. If you hover over the view
icons, you get a description of the view type they relate to and also a number. This indicates
that you can also swap views by just using the number buttons 1, 2, 3, and 4 on your
keyboard.

Navigation
However, a common way to navigate and select items and parts in FreeCAD is in the viewer
window itself, and there are numerous different navigational styles available for you to choose
from. If you hover over the viewer window and right-click, you can scroll to ‘navigational
styles’ and a drop-down list appears.

Some of the navigational styles are based on other CAD environments, so if you are used to
using, for example, Blender, then you might prefer that style. You use the ‘gesture’ style option
that gives left-click for rotation in the document window, right-click for moving, and the centre
button/wheel is for zooming. Of course, you need an object like the cylinder you created to
allow you to judge which navigational style suits you best.

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Set Up Your Workbench
The part workbench is used largely to create parts by combining solid primitive objects like the
cylinder you created. It’s definitely a good place to start, but you may find as you learn
more/other ways to create parts on different workbenches, you use this workbench less.
Returning to the cylinder you created, you can see that on the left-hand side of the screen
there is a file-tree-type view, and under the heading ‘unnamed project’, you can now see that
‘cylinder’ is listed.

You can single-left-click on this cylinder label in the file view to select the object, or you can
click on the various faces and edges of the cylinder in the document window to select them.
Clicking on the label in the drop-down menu, you should see that underneath this a new dialog
box ‘Data’ appears with details about the dimensions and position of the cylinder. Initially, the
first things you can change here are the radius and the height of the cylinder. Let’s imagine
you are making a simple wheel for a toy car, and make the wheel radius 12 mm. Next, let’s set
the height of the cylinder to 15 mm.

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Whole Holes
Click the cylinder tool once again and you’ll see another cylinder appear in the file tree view.
You may not see the cylinder appear in the document viewer window, however, as it’s smaller
than the other cylinder and is currently positioned inside it. If you left-click the new cylinder in
the file tree view, it should appear highlighted in the document viewer window. Change the
radius of the new cylinder to 1.5 mm and adjust the height to match the first cylinder, which
was 15 mm. If you click anywhere off the image of the cylinders in the viewer window, you
should now be able to see the ends of the cylinder you created in the top and bottom of the
original cylinder.

Quick Tip: Hover your mouse over any tool icon in FreeCAD for a couple of seconds to get a
text description of what the tool does.

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Slicing And Dicing
Similar to most drawing and CAD packages, you can combine objects in multiple ways to
create new objects. You should be able to see a selection of tool icons, some of which feature
blue circles overlapping in different ways. Hovering over these icons, you should find one
described ‘make a cut of two shapes’. You are going to use this tool to cut the 1.5 mm radius
cylinder you just made out of the larger one. Select the larger cylinder first in the file tree and
then hold either the SHIFT or the CTRL key down whilst you select the smaller cylinder. Once
they are both selected, click the ‘make a cut of two shapes’ tool icon and a hole should appear
through your first cylinder. If for any reason both cylinders disappear, it probably means you
have selected them in the wrong order and have cut the larger cylinder out of the smaller one,
which leaves no object behind!
Press Ctrl + Z to undo and try again. The shortcuts may be different on your OS.
NB: You can see, and change them in the Tools > Customize menu.

You should now see that in the file tree your cut object has been renamed to ‘Cut’. If you click
the small arrow to the left of ‘Cut’, you should see a drop-down which contains both your
original cylinders but greyed out.

These objects, despite being components of a completed cut, can still be altered.
For example, if you wanted to change the radius of the hole to 2 mm from its current 1.5 mm,
you can do this without redoing the cut operation. Select the file tree name for the smaller
cylinder, then press the SPACE bar. This should make the cylinder that made the hole visible in
the viewer window. You can then use the dialog box to change the radius of the cylinder and
then press the SPACE bar again to turn off the visibility of the object. This should reperform
the cut with the new-sized cylinder. You can also change the position of the hole if needed by
moving the object.

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Wheely Good
The wheel design looks a little unrefined, so let’s add some features to make it look a little
cooler. Let’s create another cylinder and change the radius of this cylinder to 10 mm, and set
its height to 3 mm. You are going to perform another cut with this object, but you want to
move it to the top of the wheel design. To do this, double-click on the new cylinder object in
the file tree. You should now see a Tab box called ‘Tasks’. In the dialogbox ‘Location’, you can
now change x, y and z-values to move the cylinder around to the right position.

This usually defaults to one millimetre, but you can set it to any step size you prefer. For
example, in the case, if you set the Z-position to 12 mm, bringing the 3 mm-high cylinder
flush with the top of the design. Whilst you don’t need it for the wheel, it’s worth having a play
with it. When done, click ‘OK’

Next, perform a cut to remove the new cylinder from the design.
You then continued to make the wheel look a little fancier by creating four more cylinders of 2
by 12mm. You moved the four cylinders equally outwards by 5 mm from the centre of the
wheel using the moving techniques you learnt earlier. You should end up with a simple wheel.

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Finishing Touches
the wheel is looking wheel-like, but the part workbench has some simple tools you can use to
embellish it a little. You may have noticed in the viewer window that you can highlight/select
either the faces or the edges of objects. Often you can also select corner points of objects, but
as everything is circular in the wheel design, that doesn’t apply here. The part workbench has
two nice tools for adding either fillets or chamfers to edges of objects. They appear as two tool
icons: the fillet tool as a curved area between two flat surfaces, and the chamfer tool as an
angled flat surface. In the viewer window, left-click to select the outside edge of the top of the
wheel, and then click the fillet tool. In the dialog box, you can see a list of edges, including the
selected edge. This is useful if you want to apply multiple fillets to multiple edges in one
operation. You can also adjust the radius of the fillet in the dialog. You’ll leave ours at 1 mm
and click OK to apply the fillet. Both the fillet and the chamfer tools can be used on either
external or internal edges. As an example, let’s select the edge inside at the bottom of the
large cut-out at the top of the wheel. Click the chamfer tool this time, and set the chamfer
length to 0.5 mm and OK it. You should see that a nice internal chamfer has been created.
Finally, you added a matching fillet to the bottom outside edge of the wheel.

Rename
Now you have the basic wheel design (it's called ‘fillet’ in the file hierarchy). Whilst you can
click it to select the entire wheel, if you double-click it, this reopens the dialog for the fillet
operation. This means that this part can be tricky to move. A common way to deal with this,
which is also useful for us as you want to have four of the wheels, is to create simple copies of
a part.
First, to help keep things orderly, let’s right-click on ‘fillet’, select ‘rename’, and call it ‘wheel’.
Renaming this doesn’t change the fact that if you double-click it, it won’t open up the fillet
dialog, but will help us track when you make multiple items.

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Create Copies
To create the copies, single-left-click ‘wheel’ in the file tree view to select the wheel and then
go to the ‘part’ drop-down menu; select ‘create a copy’, then ‘create a simple copy’. Clicking
this option will create a new ‘wheel001’.

Clicking this option will create a new ‘wheel001’. If you double-click on wheel001, you can see
that it can now be moved in the 3 axises as well as rotate as a separate item. The behaviour of
the change you can set in the ‘Tasks’ tab.

As we made a ‘simple copy’, our new wheel doesn’t contain the hierarchy of operations and
objects our original has and also is not dynamically linked to the original object. This means
that if we make further changes to our original ‘wheel’, these aren’t pushed through to the
simple copies. However, of course, you can delete the copies, make a change to the design,
and recopy if needed.

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Let’s make copies and lay them out as a set of four.

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The Next Step
We’re going to 3D-print these wheels, and you could just export one instance of the wheel and
then duplicate it in the slicer software – but, again, it’s just as easy to do this in FreeCAD.
Having made the four copies of the wheel, let’s save the work and then, select all 4 wheel.
Next click ‘file – export’. You can export a mesh file of the wheels ready for slicing for 3D
printing. Select ‘STL Mesh (*.stl, *.ast)’ as file type to save as and give it a name eg.
‘4Wheels.stl’.
Having exported the STL file, you could open it in the favoured slicer and 3D-print them.

Transparency
Selecting items in the file tree makes them become highlighted in the document viewer
window and, whilst this is useful sometimes, it’s easier to set some component items to be
different colours and adjust their transparency. This can help us see the internal geometry of
parts, and can allow us to check internal positions. To do this, highlight a part in the file tree
view and right-click. Scroll to ‘appearance’. In the menu that appears, you will see that you can
set the material type and also the shape and line colour, and also set the transparency.

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Using Part Design and Sketcher workbenches

You are going to design a small bird feeder using the 'Part design' and 'Sketcher' workbenches
using different methods where you will create a 'body' using the 'Part design' and 'Sketcher'
workbenches. The techniques are a little more complex, but give a much more control over
designs.

What is a body?
A body is best described as a component part that is one continuous solid object. To visualise
this, an example could be a nut and a bolt. If you wanted to model a nut and bolt, they would
both be separate bodies that could then be fastened together as an assembly. The 3D form of
a nut and a bolt can be modelled as a continuous single piece, and so each can be considered
a body. In this tutorial, you are using sketches and performing operations on the sketches such
as 'padding' where you extrude a sketch, and 'pocketing' where you cut the shape of a sketch
into an existing object. However, you can also add primitive objects on the Part Design
workbench similar to the use of the part workbench.

Pick your workbench

Opening FreeCAD, start a new document and then select the Part Design workbench from the
drop-down menu. You should see in the combo view, on the left-hand side, a single option
which is 'create body' – click this.

You will then be presented with two options: 'Create sketch' and 'Create boolean'. Click 'Create
sketch'. You are then presented with a choice of which plane to base the sketch in: XY, XZ, or
YZ.
An easy way to visualise the XY plane is by imagining a 3D printer and looking down on it from
above onto the bed. If sketched onto the printer bed, then working you are working on the XY
plane. Select the XY plane and click OK. At this point, FreeCAD should automatically switch to
the Sketcher workbench.

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Next, select the 'Create a polyline' tool icon?

Draw three connected lines in a U-shape roughly laid out. Starting at the top left-hand side of
the U, click on the vertical zero-line on the Y-axis at any height and then drag the line down to
the origin point of the XY plane.
Conveniently, when hover over either zero-line or any point they will turn yellow. Clicking when
yellow, will place the drawn object on the highlighted point or line. Next, pull the line out
horizontally and left-click before pulling it up vertically. Right-click to end the three lines. If you
have done this correctly, the horizontal line and vertical line will be white, but will have a small
red horizontal or respectively vertical line.

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In the combo view panel, you should see a 'Solver messages' tab with a message about
numerous 'degrees of freedom'.

The aim is to reduce these degrees of freedom to zero by constraining all the items within a
sketch. Constraining a sketch is the process of adding constraints that complete all the
information about a sketch item's positions and dimensions. This is an incredibly useful

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approach, meaning you can return to sketches at any point in the design and make changes
that will be automatically recalculated into the whole model.
The sketcher solver automatically adds some constraints when it guesses, for example, you
want a line to be vertical or horizontal, as you have just done.
Starting on a line and including the origin point on the XY plane also means that you don’t
need to constrain these lines positional co-ordinates, but you do need to constrain the lengths
of the line. Later you will constrain items that aren’t on these lines, so you’ll see how to set
positions of items relative to other parts of the design.

Constraining choices
As you get used to applying constraints, you will realise that there are lots of different ways to
achieve the same results. To constrain the lines, go to select the two vertical lines. To do this,
right-click to deactivate the line drawing tool and then left-click on both the vertical lines in
turn. Next, press the 'Create an equality constraint' tool.

Note: you might need to expand the toolbar by clicking the double right-pointing arrow.

The two lines should now appear as an equal but undefined length. If you left-click on the red
point at the top of either line and drag it, you should now find that both lines extend together
as they are constrained as equal. This ability to extend the line is a degree of freedom, and
sometimes, clicking and dragging items in the sketch can help identify what you need to
constrain. Left-click to select 'Fix a vertical distance' tool icon

In the dialogue box that appears, type '20 mm', and then click OK. You should now see a red
constraint label with '20 mm' in the viewer window – both vertical lines are now set to 20 mm.
If you ever want to change this value, double-click on the constraint in the viewer
window and the dialog box will reopen. You can click and drag the constraint around in the
viewer window, and as you add more detail and constraints, you might do this to keep things
clear.

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Next, select the horizontal line and click the 'Fix a horizontal distance' tool

Set this length to 80 mm. You should now see that the sketch as it stands is fully constrained,
the solver says there are no degrees of freedom, and that all lines are green.

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A bit sketchy
Click the 'Create an arc' tool icon, but click its drop-down menu and scroll to the 'End points
and rim point' option.

Hover over the uppermost point of the left-hand vertical line until the point becomes yellow,
single left-click, and then move across to the top point of the right-hand vertical line and left-
click again – this creates the end points of the arc. Next, move up and towards the centre of
the two vertical lines to finish the arc roughly in the correct place. To constrain the arc – as the
end points are already constrained – you just need to set the radius of the arc. Highlight the
arc line and then click the 'Constrain an arc or a circle' tool icon

and in the dialog box, set the radius to 40 mm. You should now have a fully constrained
sketch, with all lines turned green.

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This sketch is the main outline of the bird feeder, so click 'close' on the sketch solver panel in
the combo view window, and return to the Part design workbench. Make sure that the sketch
you drew is highlighted in the file tree, then click the 'Tasks' tab just above the file tree view.

Click 'Pad', and then type '15 mm' in the dialog box to set the thickness of the pad/extrusion.

For the rest of this project, you are going to create more sketches, but these sketches are
going to be drawn onto faces of the pad object you have just made. The first job is to make a
pocket for the bird feed to be contained in. So, left-click in the viewer to select the upper face
of the object.

Note: to fit the content on the screen you can zoom in or out holding the Crtl-key and rolling
the mouse-wheel or click the ‘Fit the whole content on the screen’ button

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Then click the 'Create sketch' tool icon which should now bring you back into the Sketcher
workbench with the face of the pad you selected in view.

Click the 'Create a circle' tool icon.

Left-click and drag and left-click again to draw a circle of any size anywhere in the Sketcher
viewer. Use the 'Constrain an arc or circle' tool you used earlier to set the raduis to 20 mm.
Exit the tool, pressing the Esc-key.

Next, click to select the centre point of the circle. To position the 20 mm circle, click the
'Horizontal distance constraint' tool used earlier and set the distance to the midpoint of the
feeder, which is 40 mm. Next, set the vertical height of the centre point of the circle relative to
the zero point at 30 mm. This should place it nicely centralised in the feeder design and should
be fully constrained.

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Close the sketch, and with this new sketch highlighted in the file tree, click 'Pocket' from the
list on the 'Tasks' tab. You should now see that it’s cutting the circle as a pocket into the bird
feeder design. Eet the depth of the pocket to 8 mm.

Quick Tip
You can use the constraint tools in different ways – you can select the sketch item and then
click the constraint tool, or you can select the tool first and then click the item or items.

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A sticking point
To attach the bird feeder, create a pocket and a slot which is used to fit some rubber window
suckers. The arrangement of the slotted pocket could also allow the bird feeder to slot onto a
couple of small screws.
In the Part design viewer, rotate the bird feeder and selected the bottom of the design opposite
to the pocket just created. As before with this selected, click the 'Create a sketch' tool. Next,
select the 'Create a rectangle' tool icon. Draw two rectangles of any size anywhere in the
sketcher window. Conveniently the rectangle drawing tool constrains the vertical and horizontal
lines, so all you have to add is the line lengths and the positions. Make the rectangles 10 mm
by 6 mm.

Then use the zero axis point to locate the closest rectangle to it, 8 mm across and 4 mm down
from the straight edges of the design using the horizontal and vertical distance constraint tools
and a corner point of the rectangle, as you have done with other items.
However, to position the other rectangle, use a clever little function. By clicking the 'Create an
edge linked to an external geometry' tool, you can select and import lines from the underlying
object which aren’t in this sketch.

Hover over the 20 mm vertical line at the far edge of the bird feeder and select it, once
highlighted. This now creates an edge and points at either end to which you can attach objects
or constraints. This means that instead of calculating the position of the other rectangle from
the XY zero origin point, you can now constrain this by saying it is 8 mm and 4 mm from the
opposite corner of the object.

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Having constrained the rectangles sketch, close the sketch and performed another pocket
operation to a depth of 10 mm.

Next, cut slots that go into these pockets, so select the face of the back of the bird feeder
object that need to be sketched on and create a new sketch.

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Finishing off
In this sketch use the 'create a slot in the sketch' too. This tool works similarly to the rectangle
tool but creates a pill-shaped slot item.

Similarly again, some of the edges and arcs are partially constrained. You can constrain these
in multiple ways, but opt to select two opposite points on either side of the slot and constrain
the horizontal distance between them to 4 mm. Then constrain just one of the vertical lines to
10 mm as both sides are considered an equality. With a fixed width and height, there is no
need to constrain the arc, and so position the slot sketches in the correct places to coincide
with the rectangular pocket. Use the point at the centre of the top end of each slot (the centre
point of the radial arcs) to position the slots to coincide with the rectangle pockets. This should
be 13mm from the edge. Remember to use the 'Create an edge linked to an external
geometry' tool.
Position top centre point of the slots at 5 mm from the bottom.

Close the sketch and again performed a pocket, setting the depth to 5 mm, to cut into the
rectangular pocket, but not deeper into the object.
Finally, Added a fillet to the edge of the top of the feeder and the feeder bowl by selecting the
top face of the feeder and clicking the 'fillet tool' icon and setting the fillet radius to 2 mm.

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Hopefully, you now have a feel for how sketching and constraints work – the great advantage
being that, if you want to change a dimension or position at a later date, you can click through
to find the underlying sketch constraint, edit it, and the whole design relating to that change
will be updated. It’s a powerful and useful way to work.

Quick Tip
You have mainly created sketches on the object and pocketed them, but, of course, you can
create sketches and extrude them just as easily using the 'Pad' tool

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Thickness
For a quick example of using the Thickness’ tool, begin in the Part Design workbench and
create a new body. Create a new sketch in the body on the XY plane, then select the polygon
tool to draw a hexagon. Start your hexagon on the 0,0 point of the axis so that it is positionally
constrained. You should have a hexagon with two degrees of freedom.
A simple way to constrain a hexagon is to make the uppermost line of the hexagon horizontal
by selecting the line and clicking the ‘create a horizontal constraint’ tool. Next, you can select
two nodes vertically above each other, and set a vertical distance to fully constrain the sketch

Close the sketch and then pad the sketch with 50 mm using the pad dialogue found on the
tasks tab in the combo view window.

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We are going to now use the thickness tool to hollow out our hexagonal extrusion. Select the
upper face of the hexagonal extrusion and then click the ‘Thickness’ tool. You should see
instantly that the part now appears as a hollowed version of itself. Make is 2 mm.
In the thickness tool dialog, you can see the selected face and change various parameters

You can, of course, increase and decrease the thickness that is created. By default, the
thickness dialog adds the thickness to the outside of the underlying geometry, so if you set the
hexagon vertical constraint to 60 mm you now will have an object that is 62 mm (60 mm + 2
mm thicknesses). If you want to create an object that matches the external dimensions of the
underlying geometry, click the ‘Make thickness inwards’ box. You can also swap between Arc
and Intersection, which essentially toggles between creating filleted edges or sharp edges on
the thickness.
Finally, if you want to apply a thickness but create an object which is more of a pipe than a
bowl, you can click the ‘Add Face’ button. In the preview window, the original selected face
reappears highlighted and you can select the opposite face. You should now have a hexagonal
object with a wall thickness with both ends open.

Other options
The thickness tool is an excellent way to quickly create hollow geometries, but it does have
some limitations. It can fail to work with more complex shapes. Things like curvy cones can be
its nemesis. Later on we’ll look at ‘Lofting’ tools, which enable us to create hollow parts with
curved walls and more.

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Let’s get parametric!

We looked at making multiple ’simple copies’ of parts using the ‘part’ menu on the part
workbench. You can also use that approach to create simple copies of bodies that you have
designed in Part Design. Sometimes we might want to make multiple similar parts, but with
one or more dimensions changed – for example, if we were drawing a model of a 3D printer
that used the common 2020 aluminium extrusion.

One way we could make this easier is to draw an aluminium extrusion profile sketch, and then
pad or extrude it multiple times to multiple lengths. As a workflow, we might choose to use the
Part Design workbench to create a body for our original extrusion and then create multiple
simple copies on the part workbench.
This is a very simple example that introduces the idea of working parametrically. Parametric
work in CAD is where we can change the model geometry by adjusting parameters such as
dimensions. Whilst only being one parameter, we can use this mini project to learn about using
a spreadsheet to store and alter parameters for objects and sketches.

We are going to work with a simple design for a tube and created a new project. On the Part
Design workbench we select to create a new body and then to create a sketch in the XY plane.
We drew a shape of circle, put a constraint on it of 20 mm.

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Having constrained the sketch, we now pad it to 50 mm, make an inner tichnes of 3 mm and
remove the bottom.

We could now, of course, just set a pad length of extrusion and then create a simple copy on
the part workbench to create different length parts, but we want to learn how to use the
spreadsheet function to further explore parametric work.
Let's move to the spreadsheet workbench using the workbench drop-down menu, and click the
‘create a new spreadsheet’ icon.

You should now see a spreadsheet open in the preview window in a separate tab.

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This is very handy, as it allows quick switching between the model and the spreadsheet. If you
close the spreadsheet tab, the spreadsheet is still an item in the file tree view and you can
double-click to open it. The spreadsheet functions are very capable, and similar to standard
spreadsheets you may have used in office software. For this simple task, we are going to write
the label ‘Length’ in cell A1, and then in cell B1 we can type a length we want our extrusion to
be. When we type a dimension into a constraint in the sketcher, it interprets that number as
the units you use throughout FreeCAD, which can be set in the preferences menu. In our case,
this is millimetres and will be the case for our spreadsheet values, so we don’t need to define
our input units in the spreadsheet. Set cell B1 to 100

Click back onto the preview tab with the model in it. Reopen the pad by double-clicking on the
pad in the file tree. In the input box for ‘length’ you should see the current pad length value,
but you should also see a blue circle icon on the right-hand side of the box . Click this to open
the formula editor.

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In this input box, now start to type ‘Spreadsheet’. You should find that it automatically
suggests the word spreadsheet as you start typing. Click the suggested ‘Spreadsheet’ from the
drop-down and it should insert the word spreadsheet followed by a full stop. After the full stop,
we need to input the cell location of the cell from which we want it to take its value. If you
type ‘B’, it again should automatically suggest ‘B1’ as a value. This autosuggestion is useful
when we come to projects with numerous cells of data in a spreadsheet, as it will only suggest
cells that have data in them. Click the ‘B1’ so that the value in the formula editor reads
‘Spreadsheet.B1’.

Returning to the preview tab with the model in, you should see that the extrusion body is now
padded or extruded to the 100 mm length. You can now create multiple simple copies from the
body using the ‘create a simple copy’ tool in the ‘part’ drop-down on the Part Workbench,
changing the length of the original body copy in the spreadsheet.

So now, you can change the length in the spreadsheet so the length of the (original) tube
changes and then create a copy of it to have a new tube.

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Let's combine our new skills!
Having explored using both spreadsheets and the thickness tool, let’s combine our new skills
and create an automatic parametric box generator. This simple project makes it easy to create
a box and lid of any size that we could 3D-print or CNC-machine.
Let’s begin by creating a new project. In the new project, go to the spreadsheet workbench
and create a new spreadsheet. For the main body of our box, we are going to need four
parameters: the box-length (40.00), box-width (45.00), box-height (50.00), and the box-
thickness (2.00). Create labels for these parameters in cells, and in adjacent cells input some
initial values: 40, 45, 50, 2

Next, jump to the Part Design workbench and create a body and a sketch in the XY plane. We
are going to draw a rectangle around the zero point and then, at first, constrain it to always be
centred around the origin point of the sketch. Draw the rectangle and then click the ‘create a
symmetry’ constraint tool. Use the symmetry constraint tool to select the upper right-hand
node, the vertical Y axis line and the upper left-hand node. Repeat this for the upper right, he
X axis line and lower right nodes. Now the rectangle should always be centred around the 0,0
co-ordinates, regardless of its size.
Next, let’s add a constraint for the box length by selecting the top line and clicking the ‘Fix the
horizontal distance’ tool. In the input box, click the blue circle formula editor button and insert
‘Spreadsheet’, followed by the cell location for the box length, which in our case was B1.
Repeat this for the vertical line to set the box width, B2, and the sketch should now appear
fully constrained.

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Close the sketch and perform a ‘pad’ task to extrude the box; set the pad dimension to receive
the input from the box height cell, B3, in the spreadsheet. Next, we will click the upper surface
of our box and use the thickness tool we explored earlier to hollow out our box. To set the
thickness, we are going to link the thickness value in our spreadsheet, B4. We make it an
outwards thickness. All being well, you should now have a hollow box in the preview window.

To make a lid, we are going to do the same process as we did to make the box section, but we
are going to use some simple formulae so that the lid is generated to fit whatever dimensions
are of the box created.

So go the the spreadsheet and add the lid length,width and height. But first all the clearance,
being the space between the lid-edge and the box-edge to easy putting the lid on the box.
Make that clearance 0.5 mm. So the length of the lid becomes now the length of the box +
twice the thickness of the box + twice the clearance: =B1 + 2 * B4 + 2 * B5. Do identical for
the width becoming = B2 + 2 * B4 + 2 * B5. The lid height can be any length, I choose 12.
Thickness is the same as the bow: = B4

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On the Part Design workbench, click to create a new sketch on the XY plane. We don’t need to
import any geometry from our first sketch, but let’s draw another rectangle and place it along
the x axis so it isn’t on top of our box base. To positionally constrain this lid rectangle, select
the upper left corner node and the sketch origin point at 0,0 and set a horizontal distance
constraint. For the value of this constraint, we have linked the spreadsheet cell that holds the
box length value, B1. This means that the lid will always be away from the box with a gap in
between them.
Next, create a symmetry constraint against the x axis line. Now add constraints for length and
width based on the spreadsheet values for length D1 and width, D2.

Now pad the lid and add tickness outwards.

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We constrained the length and width of the lid sketch by adding constraints linked to our
calculated dimensions in the spreadsheet. We then performed a pad using the lid_depth value
and, in turn, applied a thickness to the lid using the thickness value in the spreadsheet. You
now have an automatic box generator at your disposal! Simply change the parameters in the
spreadsheet and it will automatically generate your box with a fitting lid.

Lining up
Once you have your box generator set up, you can generate boxes of any dimensions easily.
The layout on the XY plane means that the box and lid will be easy to export and 3D-print, as
both parts are modelled in a way that emulates them sitting on the print bed. If you wanted to
look at your box with the lid in position, again you could create a simple copy on the part
workbench and move and rotate those parts into the correct position.

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Curving all the way

First up is the Additive Loft function, which is a method that creates straight or curved
transitions between sketches. It’s a great way of creating complex flowing shapes. To start
with, we will make a nonsense object just to see how it works, and then we will create a small
ornamental bowl that can be 3D-printed.
On the Part Design workbench, create a new body and then create a new sketch on the XY
plane. This should move you onto the sketcher workbench. Select the rectangle tool and draw
a rectangle in this sketch. As this is a test, we don’t need to add constraints, so close this
sketch now.

In the Part Design workbench again, within the same body, create a second sketch. Click the
'Create sketch' button, and select the XY plane for our second sketch. In this second sketch,
use the regular polygon tool to draw a hexagon that is smaller than the rectangle you drew –
draw it inside the rectangle, and don’t worry if it overlaps a little. Again, we don’t need to
constrain the hexagon, so close the sketch.

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The next step is to move the hexagon sketch away from the rectangle sketch in the Z-axis.
As both of the sketches are part of the same body, we can’t move the basic position of the
hexagon sketch, but we can move the relative attachment point of the sketch. With the sketch
containing the hexagon selected, you should see the dialogue box for the sketch in the combo
view panel. In this dialogue box, there are three sections of values separated under the
headings 'Attachment', 'Base', and 'Sketch'.

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Making sure you are in the Attachment section, click the Attachment menu, and then click to
expand the Position menu. In this drop-down menu, adjust the Z-axis to raise the hexagon
sketch over the rectangle. This can be any amount, but I went for 20 mm. If you are in an
isometric view in the Part Design workbench, you should see the hexagon sketch rise above
the rectangle sketch.

Next, select the original rectangle sketch in the file tree view, and then click the yellow and red
'loft a selected profile through other profile sections' tool.

In the combo view panel, you should now see a window – click the 'Add section' button. Having
clicked that, select the hexagon sketch in the preview window. As you do this, you should see
a preview of the lofted part connected between the rectangle and the hexagon.

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There are a couple of checkboxes you can click: one is called 'closed' which will close the ends
of the lofted object, and the other is 'ruled surface'. Clicking 'ruled surface' toggles the lofted
object between having either straight line/plane geometries or curved. It is not that obvious a
difference with our simple example, but we will use this in our next lofting project.
To finish, click the 'closed' checkbox and then OK to perform the loft. In the preview window,
you will now see the resulting object.

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Lofted objects are like any other in that you can use other tools on the objects created with
them, such as selecting edges for fillets. However, when the surfaces generated become
complex and curved, you might find that some tools don't work and we need a different
approach.

One thing people often try with the lofting tool is to apply a thickness to the resulting object to
hollow it out. Sadly the thickness tools only work on simple geometries, so it’s not possible to
work this way. However, let’s make a more interesting lofted object and show how we can
create curved objects with defined thickness walls.

In a new project, create a body and create a sketch in the XY plane. Draw two circles
constrained around the origin point and make one slightly smaller than the other; the distance
between them will create the wall thickness of our object. We made our sketch with the outer
circle having a diameter of 25 mm and the inner circle having a diameter of 22 mm, to give a
wall thickness of 1.5 mm
Close the sketch and then create another sketch in the XY plane. Create a larger pair of circles,
but with the same wall thickness – we went for 45 mm and 42 mm.
Close this sketch and then create a third sketch with a pair of circles constrained to match the
first set we drew.

Quick tip : When you are drawing the third sketch, the circles will appear exactly on top of the
firstsketch. To make it easier, make the original sketch invisible by highlighting it in the file
tree, toggling visibility by pressing the space bar.

With the second sketch highlighted, move these circles up the Z-axis using the same method
we used earlier with our hexagon. Move it up by 25 mm. Next, do the same with the third
sketch, moving it up the Z-axis 60 mm.

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Create the loft in a similar way to the earlier example, starting by selecting the first sketch and
then adding the second sketch and the third sketch in that order. If you uncheck the ruled
option and the closed option, you should end up with a nice curvy shape.

Sweeping along a path is a similar idea to revolving a sketch and also shares some attributes
of lofting. However, sweeping uses a user-drawn path or geometry that the extrusion is swept
along, rather than an automatically generated one. There are a couple of approaches to
sweeping in FreeCAD: one using the part workbench, the other using the Part Design
workbench. Let's look at both to have both methods in our skill set.

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Curving in Part Design
Starting on the Part Design workbench, create a new project, create a body, and create a
sketch in the XY plane. In the blank sketch, make a small closed shape around the origin point.
We drew a square and then added some fillets in the corners by clicking the 'create a fillet
between two lines or at a coincident point' tool.

With the fillet tool selected, click on some corners of the square to add some fillets, and resize
them to make an interesting shape. This shape will be the profile of our item we extrude by
sweeping it along a path. Again, constraining the sketch is unimportant for a simple
exploration of the tool.

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Close the sketch and then create a new empty sketch in the body. Create this new sketch in
the XZ plane. In this sketch, we are going to create the path along which our first sketch
profile will be swept. Let's use 'create a B-spline in the sketch' tool.

This tool allows us to create a combination of curves in a single line. With the B-spline tool
selected, left-click over the origin point in the sketch and pull a line up and to the right or left
of vertical, then left-click again and continue with the next line upwards and back towards the
centre line. Left-click again and move back out to the right and upwards to create a skewed
kind of Z-shape. Left-click to set the next point, and then right-click to finish the B-spline. The
two lines you drew should now become curved, and you should see some blue circles. Simply,
for now, moving the circles allows you to adjust the curve of the lines. Make a nice swooping
curve, such as the one I created.

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Close the sketch, and in the preview window, you can rotate your view a little and see that the
curved edge we created starts at the origin point, which is in the middle of our profile sketch.

To sweep the profile along the curved path, highlight the first sketch we made and then click
the yellow and red 'sweep a selected sketch along a path' tool.

You should see a dialogue box appear in the combo view panel. In the dialogue box, we need
to select the path or object along which to sweep. We can do this in a couple of ways. We can
either click the 'Object' button under the 'path to sweep along', or we can click the 'Add Edges'
button. Having clicked either of these buttons, we can then select the curved path in the
preview window. You should now see a brown preview of the profile swept along our path.
Click 'OK' to finish the sweep. You should now have a nice swept object in the preview window.

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There are many other options in the sweep utility in the Part Design workbench that can
change the way that corners are handled in a swept object, and also how it handles
transforming from one profile to another profile over the course of a sweep, which we will
explore on the part workbench shortly. The other thing of note on the Part Design workbench is
that there is a blue and red icon that is the same as the sweep tool we used, except that it's
for subtractive sweeps.

This means you could draw a solid object and then cut out and remove a swept path through
it.

Quick Tip: The Part Design workbench sweep tool creates single solid body objects, but we
can apply some techniques we learnt, where we used the 'Create a thickness tool'. As a
quick recap, select the face of one end of our swept solid object and click the thickness tool. In
the dialogue box, you can set the thickness of the wall structure, and to make it a pipe object
open at both ends, click 'Add face' and then additionally select the opposite end of the swept
object.

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Curving in Part
Finally, let’s look at the sweep utilities on the Part workbench, which are laid out a little
differently. We will also create two profiles and a path, and the profile will be transformed from
one shape to the other along the path. Let's create a new project in Part Design workbench ,
create a new body. Create a new sketch in the XY plane and then draw a circle anchored
around the origin point. It is up to you if you want to constrain it or not for this example. Close
that sketch and then create a second sketch, again in the XY plane. In this sketch, let's draw a
square around the origin point which should be a similar size to the circle we drew in the first
sketch. Close this sketch, but highlight it in the combo view panel so that the dialogue box
options for the sketch appear below it. We are going to move the position of the sketch so that
it shifts vertically 70 mm up the Z-axis. In the sketch dialogue box under the 'Attachment'
heading, open the drop-down menu labelled 'Attachment' then, in turn, open the drop-down
menu labelled 'Position'. In this menu, change the Z-axis value to 70 mm.
You should be able to see in the preview window that the square is now above the circle.

Next, making sure nothing is selected in the file tree, add a third sketch with this sketch drawn
on the XZ plane. Using the 'create an edge linked to an external geometry' tool,

click the horizontal line that is on the upper square sketch. Next, use the B-spline tool to
create a nice curved line which starts at the origin point and curves up to reach the centre of
the upper square sketch.

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Then close the sketch, and you should have three sketches roughly similar to this.

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Moving to the part workbench, click the 'utility to sweep' tool.

In the dialogue box, you should see the list of sketches on the left-hand side. In turn, select
the first sketch containing the circle, and click the right-facing arrow that becomes highlighted
to move the sketch into the 'selected profiles' column. Repeat this for the second sketch –
the sketch that contains the square. Next, click the 'Sweep path' button, and the dialogue box
will become greyed out. Click the path you want to sweep along in the preview window to turn
it green, and then click the curved path we created earlier. Next, click 'Done' and then click the
'OK' button. You should now see the circle profile has been swept towards the square on our
curved path, and it has transformed throughout the curve to conform to the square profile.

In the file tree, this is now a 'sweep' object, and double-clicking the sweep object doesn’t allow
you to edit the sweep, but rather, opens the dialogue box to move and rotate the part. If you
want to change any sweep parameters, you must select the sweep object and delete it, which
will return you to just having the three separate sketches, and then repeat the sweep utility
process. In the dialogue box for the sweep utility, you can select to make the object a solid.
Then, you could create a simple copy and then use the thickness and other tools and utilities.

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Want some video’s

Note: the man will repeat himself, certainly at the beginning of each video, but otherwise these
are good learning video’s.

• FreeCAD: Installation and Initial Setup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4WzCjmuJg0

• FreeCAD: Lesson 1 | Basics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JOITgw_T1Y

• FreeCad: Lesson 2 | Pad and Pocket

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LiKwUFSbAw

• FreeCAD: Lesson 3 | Practical 3D Prints

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A817EnC3wnk

• FreeCAD: Spreadsheet, Part Design, Part Workbench

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWG05uh2sxM

• FreeCAD: Design a Vase with Revolve and Loft

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXFa4bt4w2I

• FreeCAD: 3d Printing Vases Cura and PrusaSlicer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr1Ms0KsaAk

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