A few months ago, I’d downloaded some car drawings from a CAD exchange site. There was a Ferrari 248TS and a BMW 850i, not to mention a Mustang Mach-III and a Viper GTS. Now, I’m not much into roadsters, but they’re always nice to spice up your drawings. So, anyway, I inserted these blocks into a number of drawings before I realised they’d been created with trial versions of AutoCAD because, when I tried to print them, I had this terribly embarrassing watermark around the edge of the sheet saying “Created with an Educational Version of AutoCAD” or some such thing. It was my fault I suppose – I should have checked beforehand.
I jumped through a number of hoops trying to salvage my work – all to no avail. Autodesk seemed to have it covered. Copying and pasting didn’t work and I can’t remember if converting the drawing to DXF and back again did the trick or not.
Then a couple of weeks ago, I hit upon a solution by accident. I was trying out the new version 2.0 of a free CAD software called A9CAD from a company whose “mission is to develop quick-to-learn, easy-to-use, affordable yet powerful software products for engineering professionals and students“. While the interface was clean, it crashed too often at startup.
Okay, since the software claimed to be compatible with DXF as well as DWG files, (and since I was unwilling to try it out on production drawings) I thought, why not open and save the offending car blocks and see if that removes the watermark.
Bingo! But before you get all excited about the program, let me tell you that it’s still a long way from being good for much else. Having said that however, I still consider it a CAD resource because it can be used as a free drawing viewer/redliner. Give it a spin – the download is about 15.24 Megs.
Update 7th August 2014:
The A9Tech site <http://www.a9tech.com/> shows a blank page.
I’d strongly recommend using DraftSight instead.
