I've been looking in to designing some half doors for my vortX

I have an idea of making a buck with plywood/balsawood/foam, I remember building some model planes I made many years ago with that technique

my question is can I use a programme that will allow me to print off templates to use to cut the wood, bit like plans for building a plane

I was thinking of doing it with foam between the formers and sand down to them to get the shape I need.

I guess the problem I have is where do I start from to get the measurements in to said programme

Anything like that about I could use?

Onshape is a free cad tool that looks good to me.

I am not a cad person and have been learning a little myself so others may know of a better program.

what I do like about onshape is it is browser based so can be used anywhere.

Thanks Will go take a look, I know of a few programmes, but I think they are meant to be used with CNC machines

I remember using a programme for when I was making an exhaust and you made paper templates to put around the pipe to give the angles you needed, forgot what that one was though.

If you have a student in the family you can get a free copy of autocad (2d and 3d) so long as you use it for non commercial uses.

The traditional way would be to model the surface you want in 3d then add cutting planes, find the profile of where they cross then lay these out on a flat plane and print off remembering to add a reference point to all curves so they can be stacked up later. I guess you will need a A3 printer at lease.

Surface modeling with any CAD package is actually surprisingly difficult.

Drawing a flat component/tube/sheet and mating it to something else is easy but getting organic shapes is harder.


If you wanted to use CAD I would suggest creating cross section planes based on a master sketch and then loft through the cross sections to give you an idea of what the thing will look like, then tweek the cross section planes and lofting perameters to give you what you want.

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Originally posted by Johneturbo
Thanks Will go take a look, I know of a few programmes, but I think they are meant to be used with CNC machines

I remember using a programme for when I was making an exhaust and you made paper templates to put around the pipe to give the angles you needed, forgot what that one was though.

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Well one thing for sure is I'm no cad designer! had a little go with onshape, as it was easy to set up without having to download anything

but my god, it's hard to do what you want when you don't know how to do it!

Myke yep that's the programme I remember

onshape gets my vote cos its free , ive been making some jig templates and so on , its pretty easy .