Comment by hyperbrainer
13 hours ago
> "highly paramteric like fastners, gears, 3D printed boxes"
1. These parts should probably be on McMaster. If you are not using them straight from there, you better have a _great_ reason as to why not when it comes up in the design review.
2. Solidworks has Smart Fasteners, Inventor has Spur Gear Component Generator, Sketch->Extrude->Shell takes 30 seconds, so not sure why 3D printed boxes would be faster or better with this for most stuff. Also, this stuff is easily solved by things like the component library and configurations.
> you better have a _great_ reason as to why not
Because I don't live in America?
Are you saying that you don't us McMaster because they don't ship to where you live? That seems silly - you can still download their drawings and then find an alternate source. They are a great listing of everything you might ever want to buy, but you can almost always find an alternative source.
There is also the possibility you think because McMaster is in the US they don't have metric parts. This is wrong, a lot of engineering in the US is done in metric - nearly all big manufacturing companies went metric 40 years ago, so they have plenty of metric parts that you should work with. Of course most manufacturing is small companies that still haven't gone metric, but they also deal with metric once in a while, and in any case you wouldn't be ordering from them anyway.
Are ISO standard parts not used where you live? McMaster is in the US but the much of the parts and CAD are standard
I download and use parts dimensioned in metric to ISO standards all the time...