We've been hearing from our customers a lot recently about DraftSight, a 2D CAD design tool that is available for free from Dassault Systèmes. It has all the features you need to get started with creating CAD drawings for Big Blue Saw. It's available to download and use for free from the Dassault website for use with Windows, Linux, and Macintosh.

Here is a very brief, very basic tutorial on using DraftSight to create drawings for Big Blue Saw.

Step 1: Start DraftSight

Start DraftSight from the Start Menu, desktop icon, or however it works on your system. You'll see the main DraftSight window as shown below.

Step 2: Choose the rectangle tool

The left hand toolbar shows a variety of drawing tools. In this tutorial, we'll be creating a simple rectangle. Click on the rectangle tool.

Step 3: Draw a rectangle

Click in the drawing area to define one corner of the rectangle.

Then move the mouse and click on the diagonally opposite corner to define the other corner of the rectangle.

You now have a CAD drawing of a rectangle.

Step 4: Save the file

Choose "File | Save As" from the menu.

Enter the file name in the appropriate box. Next, choose the file type from the drop down list. Here we're choosing "R2013 ASCII Drawing (*.dxf)". You want to pick one of the "ASCII DXF" file types for use with Big Blue Saw.

Click the "Save" button to complete saving the file. Congratulations! You now have your first DraftSight CAD drawing ready to use with Big Blue Saw's online quoting system.

Once you use Big Blue Saw to turn your rectangle design into a real part made out of metal or plastic, you could use it as a spacer, shim, bookmark, backing plate, or divider. It's not much to look at, but now that you've gotten started, you can play around with DraftSight and see its tools for making other shapes.

Want to know more? Let us know in the comments!