In case anyone is following this; I have been creating many sketches on my loft. I thought I had to put datum planes on a face but I guess that isn't true all the time, only when the face is a complex shape, mapping sketches to a face works fine if the face is flat. I also found that a copy and past...

You have noticed it yourself: Loft does not always yield planar faces, or to be more precise: OCC does not recognize them as such. So the additional effort of creating a DatumPlane is not easier than to use an expression for the offset. and Moreover it seems to me more complicated and time-consumin...

After 3 hours of trying everything I could think of, I have a procedure that is topo-error immune and parametric. :o First, this is how I test for a topo error (all in Part design). Sketch and pad a solid cube, click on the top cube face and sketch and pad a feature on that face. Then go back to my ...

I don't know anything about meshes. Does the file size really need to be that large? If you take Sam and lay him in a solid and do a subtraction here in FreeCAD could you make a mold and reduce the file size? Just throwing out ideas.

Maybe chrisb will respond here, he has answered so so many posts, he is at 17000+. It was just an idea to possibly save some traffic.

It's been my experience that users from other pro-CAD packages are going to be most comfortable in Part Design, I know I am for sure. I can't hardly use Part or Draft because my brain has been wired to use a Solid Works type tree and model building. Looking at Old_Curmudgeons post tells me that maki...

If we had a field in the Help menu, could we display the current open file version? Obviously if we then save that file it would display our version. My thinking; If we had this feature then we could prompt the user to display their current version info or post a FreeCAD file. This could help tech. ...

Maybe this has been covered. When a FreeCAD file is closed it stores the current software version used to edit the file. This way any time we get a file from a user we can look at the version used. Maybe this could be started in 0.19.

I see the same problem. I then extended the first pad to make the whole part, and erased the second pad and that fixed it. I think with all the cuts and two pads that aren't one solid, that is the problem. If you need to model it this way then maybe the two pads need to be fused early in the design....

Thanks. Datum planes are really useful. Not only are they face holders but they are also sketch and feature holders. You can attach multiple sketches with features to one datum plane, then move the datum plane and everything moves as a group. For instance a hole thru with counterbore, one sketch and...