Introduction
For our scullery/utility room I was planning on designing and building a wooden pantry myself for storing our groceries. It will actually be a freestanding closet really. I’ve never built something this size myself, let alone design it. So I will borrow and build on the ideas and knowledge of others of course. Initially, I considered sketching with a pencil on paper, but after I while I realized my sketches became inapprehensible very soon. Therefore, I decided to teach myself a bit of technical drawing on the computer. As is often the case when I try new things, there is a good chance I will not use this skill again in the near future, so I’d like to archive my experiences.
Although I used Blender in the past for fun, I’ve never tried to create a real technical drawing using any CAD like software. For this project I decided to try and learn woodworking with FreeCAD, for the obvious reason that it is free. I used version 0.21.2 of the application.
Installing FreeCAD on Windows
Open a Powershell window and enter:
winget install freecad
Or go to the FreeCAD website and download the installer and install it manually.
Installing Add-ons
Via the menu at the top: Tools -> Addon Manager we can extend FreeCAD. Some extensions (Add-ons) come with an extra workbench. For this tutorial we will be using the Woodworking addon. Install this Addon via the Addon Manager and restart FreeCAD.
FreeCAD basics
FreeCAD uses so called workbenches to change the context of the object that you want to design. The set of tools in the interface changes with the selection of a workbench.
If you worked with Blender before, you can set the camera navigation to behave the same way. Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Display -> Navigation and set 3D Navigation to Blender. There are several other options as well. Otherwise, you can read about navigation with the mouse.
If you need to get more grasp moving around, you can read more about getting started with the interface, navigation and the first steps.
In this tutorial, we will maintain an orthographic view, which can be select via the View menu.
(read further on the next page)