2D CAD Drafting

I know most of the folks on here that draw up their projects are into using Sketch Up but if you happen to be looking for a nice, free program to do 2D drafting then NanoCAD might be just what you are looking for. It's especially nice if you have any background in AutoCAD at all since the interface is set up up very much the same. It also uses the .dwg format for saving and opening drawings so if you have AutoCad drawings you can open them in NanoCAD. I've worked with AutoCAD for around 20 years so when our cad developer here at work showed this to us as an alternative for home use I figured I'd try it out on some of my personal projects and I have to say I've been pretty happy with it.

Hopefully this link will work and you can see some screen shots of the program.

http://nanocad.com/page/VT1
 
Thanks for the link, Roy.

I'm just curious. For those who are making woodworking projects for others do folks still show only 2D line drawings to their clients? My experience is that most people can't convert a couple of 2D line drawings into a three dimensional thing in their head. It seems many people even have a difficult time with isometric drawings because that's not how we see.
 
I used to use Visio to do a lot of my drawing, for both work and woodworking projects. I've completely shifted over to Sketchup for my 3D woodworking and other projects.

There are a lot of things I still use Visio for, but they are all primarily 2d, like flowcharts, 2d drawings, etc.. Just wish I could find a good opensource vector based drawing program like Visio.
 
It's been a while since I looked for one. I forget which ones I had looked at.

I don't believe I've seen that one. Looks interesting. I'll check it out.

Thanks Dave!
 
I used to use Visio to do a lot of my drawing, for both work and woodworking projects. I've completely shifted over to Sketchup for my 3D woodworking and other projects. ...

Ditto. I have a ton of drawings of various types in Visio, but now use only SketchUp since Dave got me on track with it! :thumb:
 
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