Alibre Design Deal - To Good to Pass Up

I need to confess - I began investigating things regarding this project before I started this blog. Sorry, for the time being I am a few weeks ahead of my readers. The good news is that for now I have few, if any, readers - so no harm done. I figure I am pretty much writing posts to myself at this point. Nonetheless the deal described below expired about a week ago.

While grousing around the Internet for all things CNC I came across a reference to a 3D Parametric CAD product called Alibre Design. I googled 'Alibre' and found alibre.com. As is typical for CAD software they offer several levels of their product, each package having additional features at a higher price point. Alibre Design is their basic system, which regularly sells for $999, plus any ups and extras you might want to add. Alibre seems to be positioned as the value player against competitors like Solidworks.

I guess the recession has not been good for CAD vendors. Alibre management apparently decided to shake the market up and make a play for market share prior to the release of version 12 of the product. For about a month they offered Alibre Design 11.2 for $99. Basically they knocked a 9 off their regular price.

I investigated the feature set and gave it a few minutes of sober thought. OK, enough of that - I whipped out the credit card and down loaded Alibre Design 11.2 and in doing so incurred my first project expense ($99). Thus, I put the first piece of my mini-CNC manufacturing enterprise in place. Ordinarily I would not have chosen to have my first purchase for this project be a 3D feature-based CAD system , but I figure you need to take advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself. Alibre's marketing tactic certainly worked on me, probably to the eventual disadvantage of Rhino 3D.

I have been going through some of the tutorials and other things to get acquainted with my new Alibre software. So far I have been favorably impressed with both the power AND usability of the product, which is saying quite a bit since CAD systems are infamous for having a steep learning curve.

I will post more about my experience using Alibre Design when I start to define 3D geometry for the CNC router to chew on, maybe a guitar neck contour or a plantation shutter project.