Over the weekend Solidworks arrived. My first impression is wow this is easy! I can now better understand Tony Fisher's dislike of what custom puzzles have become. In only a few hours I fully designed a (failed) Helicopter Skewbik compared to the weeks it would take to make the puzzle in Blender or months to do it by hand.

When designing puzzles with Blender I had to make every layer of every piece one at a time. This includes the layer inbetween layers formed by adding gaps between surfaces. For fillets I had to make them one at a time and mesh them into the model by hand. Fillets on curved edges was impossible. The real time kicker was to hollow a piece I had to redo everything a second time with larger gaps between faces and cut this part out from the origional. Afterwards the models are a nightmare to Shapeways so I have to go through one vertex at a time and clean them up to make them manifold.

Solidworks however is amazing! Just make a single sketch and everything else is almost done for you. I have a hard time remembering I can go back and edit this sketch even after the parts have been created

It's not all perfect however. When starting up Solidworks it usually crashes! Anyone know how to fix this? Also how would I go about making a Geared Cube?

(I can't wait to show tha amazing puzzles I'm working on!)

About Solidworks crashing, how much RAM do you have installed on your computer? (Click Start - right-click My Computer - Properties [on Windows] to find out)

If you have the legal version it's a RAM problem, get yourself a new computer ^^

I also just switched from AutoCAD to Solidworks two days ago and I've already designed a puzzle I couldn't possibly do with autoocad, although autocad is more adapted than solidworks for easy puzzles (pent prism etc.)

Solidworks is amazing!! I actually designed a... you'll see later (the one in my PM, PM6262), but there's a pic in the hints thread

If you need more RAM, it might be possible to install more... It just depends on your motherboard and how old your computer is.

I have 3 GB so I don't think that's the problem. It loads fine but let's say I want to make a new part. It boots up and I make a sketch. As the camera rotates to the plane it freezes and ends up crashing. Every once in a while I can sketch a cube and exit the sketch. At this point it becomes an extremely robust program and I can exit out of that part and load my puzzle without any worries of it crashing again. (I do have a legal version, yay student edition!)

Also does anyone know how to do a Geared Cube? There are tons of gear tutorials online but not for this type of gear.

I use 4 gigs it works just fine.

Trust me, get around SW and wait a while, once you made more than once successful 3D printed puzzle, then you can try gears...

Yes it took me a while to make working puzzles but my past few puzzles have worked perfectly. I already could make an exact copy of any of my Blender puzzles in Solidworks so I need to learn how to do stuff I couldn't do before such as gears. It's like if a construction worker using a spoon to dig foundations suddenly got a steam shovel with its own trained crew. The foundation will be the exact same quality but take a fraction of the time. What should he do with all that extra time? Dig to China of course!

No offense but this is why people have told you not to use Blender. I mean yes it works, but you know what I mean.

Welcome to heaven. We hope you like it here.

I fully agree. It took so long to upgrade for two reasons,

1. Spend $100 on a program or $100 on actual puzzles.

2. Until I saw Eitan's puzzle making video on YouTube I didn't understand how powerful it is. I thought it would cut design time in half, not take only 5% the time and work while making a better quality design.

Looking back no one who told me Blender sucked at making puzzles had any experience using it so being naive I thought they just under estimated it (which was kinda true, before me the only puzzle ever made in Blender was a 1x2x3)

I did tell you!
Glad to see that you're trying something new, though- you won't regret it!
I still have to say, knowing how to use Blender is quite helpful for some things, but as a primary way to design puzzles? Nah