DeltaCAD 6.0

DeltaCAD is an inexpensive 2D computer-aided design (CAD) package that is occasionally brought up as a discussion topic in various woodworking forums. Ease of use, low cost, and a "fairly" intuitive interface are often mentioned as particular strengths of DeltaCAD, sentiments I would agree with - for the most part.

The interface provides both tool bars and menu bars for all the layout functions and after going through the online tutorial, I had most of the basics figured out. Like many CAD programs, DeltaCAD is all about points and offsets. Say you want to position a drawer handle relative to the corner of a board - first you select the point command, click on the corner of the board, and then enter an X,Y offset from the corner; a temporary point will be placed at that location and from there you can insert the segments that comprise the handle. The online tutorial does a good job of explaining this layout scheme as well as many of the commonly used functions - you would be well advised to spend the time up front going through the tutorial. In general, the online help, including the tutorial, was well written. An additional, more advanced tutorial to supplement the basic one would be beneficial.

To put DeltaCAD through it's paces, I used it to lay out the design for a chest of drawers. This was a fairly straightforward process that took me about a half hour to complete. I was pleased with how easy it was to connect the individual pieces comprising the chest - this was essentially a matter of "snapping" segments together to form the various components. The line snapping capability was intuitive and worked well. I also liked the bookmarks feature which lets you quickly select from one of five previously defined zoom and placement settings. In addition to zooming, DeltaCAD lets you define drawing and print scales; I chose a drawing scale of 10 which resulted in a 5" high printout of the chest. Some other nice features include corner rounding and chamfering (of special appeal to woodworkers), corner creation from two intersecting lines (this lets you be sloppy), layering, in which you can selectively place components in different view layers (useful for complex drawings), a symbol table, centering commands, specification of numbers as decimals or fractions, and a built-in calculator.

Note: the "jaggy" lines in the attached graphic are an artifact of the rasterization process -not a deficiency with DeltaCAD. The printed version of the chest looks much better.

I was glad to see that an Undo feature is available that lets you redo your last 50 commands (this was not the case in a version I tried out a few years ago).

The main issue I had with DeltaCAD is that the way in which some of the commands work is not very intuitive. For example, if you connect lines to form a rectangle and then wish to group those lines into an object, you have to: 1) click the Select tab, 2) select the lines with the mouse, 3) click the "Gr" button. No right clicking here. To move the rectangle, you have to: 1) click the Select tab, 2) click the "Move selected objects" button, and 3) move the object to the desired location with the mouse. Once you get the hang of the program, this is no big deal but these kind of basic operations should be more straightforward IMHO.

Couple other gripes: It took me a while to find the "undo" command because it's not listed in the online help search and it's not readily visible under the top-level menu commands. Other things I would have liked to see include true "drag-and-drop" with the left mouse button (rather than select object->click move button->position object) and the ability to right click an object with the mouse to bring up a properties box.

From a woodworker's perspective, I'm disappointed with DeltaCAD's Bill of Materials tool (it hasn't been beefed up since the last review). After laying out the afore-mentioned chest of drawers, I was hoping to crank out a detailed materials list, but alas, it was not to be. All you get are the the name and quantity of each piece, not the dimensions. (You also have to explicitly create a group for an item to appear in the Bill of Materials.)

Bottom line: In spite of these shortcomings, I found DeltaCAD to be a fun layout tool and certainly good value at under $50 -- and there is a free fully-functioning trial version that's good for 45 days. If you're new to CAD software, have fairly modest design needs, and don't want to invest the time and money into a higher-end CAD program, DeltaCAD might be just the ticket. Woodworkers with loftier design needs, such as a 3D capability, may very well graduate to a more advanced CAD package over time but DeltaCAD is an ideal way to get your feet wet.