Hey, thanks. Yeah I made the drawings in Sketchup. It's the only tool I know, and that's a problem. When it comes time to have these parts made, machine shops are accustomed to having CAD files submitted in formats that translate to their CAM software to be more-or-less directly loaded into their CNC machines. Sketchup doesn't do that. Sketchup is for hobbyists. Solidworks and Autodesk are what the industry uses, and they play nice with the machines. In the past I have had to submit my designs as PDFs with graphical drawings like this:
View attachment 98581
Then the machine shop has to re-draw it, or if it's a simple part made on a manual machine, it's good enough for the machinist to just make it.
Last month my boss paid ~$4KUSD for an annual subscription to
**broken link removed** for me to use. That's a mammoth package including AutoCAD, AutoCAD Electrical, Inventor, and a few more suites. I'm totally lost in there. I need to attend some classroom training but I don't have time. So far I've only learned enough to get by; I still do all my designs in Sketchup, but now I use a 3rd party plugin to export to *.STL, which I import into Inventor, and then save in Inventor's native format. So far nobody has complained...