Editor’s Pick: IronCAD 2016

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

IronCAD has always made collaboration a key ingredient. For example, its dual ACIS and Parasolid kernels make importing and exporting SAT, X_T and common file formats a breeze, and the company offers native CAD translators for most all mainstream CAD systems. Today’s Pick of the Week looks at the newest version of IronCAD. It has lots of goodies that span the design, fabrication and assembly cycles. As always, collaboration runs throughout the software.

The recently released 2016 edition of the IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite of 2D and 3D design, detailing, configuration and collaboration applications sees major enhancements for sheet metal and assembly work. There’s also a new Mechanical add-in with utilities for design operations.

IronCAD 2016’s sheet metal functionality has a new Sketched Bend command that lets you create more complex bending operations. An added Smart Design tool called the Smart eBehavior gives you the ability to dynamically drive designs based on optimized product configurations as well as assembly fits and functions. That means rather than building rules and variables at the part level, you can work at the assembly level, which gives you intelligent assemblies that adjust and move according to built-in rules.

The new IronCAD Mechanical add-in provides fabricators with intelligent tools like industry standard fasteners, steel sections, piping, flanges and bill of material (BOM) generation. Because intelligent components have built-in knowledge and behaviors, your typical day-to-day tasks should become much simpler.

There’s a whole bunch more going on in IronCAD 2016, including new ways to create copies and links to select points, a new quick search that dynamically filters design variations and new capabilities that let you dynamically control part numbers. Incidentally, many of the enhancements are the result of IronCAD’s collaboration with its user base.

You can see for yourself what all this means by hitting the link to the complete list of the new capabilities in IronCAD 2016 at the end of today’s Pick of the Week write-up. The operative word there is “see.” There are over 30 short videos for you to watch.

Seeing videos of IronCAD 2016 in action is good stuff. But it’s way better trying it out for yourself. Click the link to the complimentary trial download of the full IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite included in today’s write-up and beat on it. It’s worth the effort.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Learn about IronCAD 2016 here.