We typically design most custom machines in one open drawing in autocad, then later we create detail drawings for our machine and fab shops. In solid works, it seems more difficult to design like that.... modeling a single part seems relatively simple in Solidworks, but quickly designing a complete machine seems easier to fudge in Autocad. What can be denoted in a quick autocad drawing for OUR machine shop to make, requires much more exact detail when modeling in Solidworks. If I had 6 months to design a machine with many machined and fabbed structures, maybe Solidworks would be less daunting, unfortunately in the cut-throat special machine design and build world, I don't have that luxury.
I like the idea of only drawing (modeling) a part once then magically generating a three view drawing with a few clicks of a mouse, but learning to do this efficiently in Solidworks appears to require a good bit of time that I do not have presently.
All I know for sure is that I was able to learn to use Autocad's basic solid modeling fairly quickly on my own. The commands in the pull down menus make sense to me whereas much of the Solidworks stuff is not as self explanatory.
Once again, it would not suprise me if someday in the future, I learn to use and love it, but right now, I just want to smash my computer with a baseball bat and go home for thanksgiving.
