Originally Posted by w123fanman

All I can recommend for 3D printing and CAD is stay away from the Maker Bot Replicator 2 and stay away from using Autodesk Inventor. I forget what we use here at GT but they aren't too expensive. The people who run the 3D printing maker area absolutely hate all Maker Bot products, which I can agree with at least on the Replicator 2. Poor design, breaks all the time and the stock build plate warps making printing basically impossible. Print decent when it works right which is about 1% of the time. The 2X may be better. We had a lot of issues with Inventor in general but for 3D printing the sizes would come out wrong, usually the part would be some factor smaller in the printer exporting software. Easy to fix but doesn't change the fact that the Inventor software is super resources hungry (as in I've had it use up 20GB of RAM for a simple animation rendering and it would barely run, aka not at an acceptable level, on my lower level gaming laptop (i7, dedicated video, 12gb memory) and buggy.