Creating Furniture Design For Outsourced Cutting

[uber]

We have been looking at adding a limited number of furniture products to our ecommerce store and would like to design the product to our own spec then outsource the cutting to someone to create a flatpack.

Any software out there anyone would recommend to do the original design then create the patterns for final output?

[Smiler.]

I use Inventor. There are equivalents that, if one hasn't already sold one's soul, are a cheaper alternative.

Inventor is capable, but I never use it without some AutoCAD involvement.

[User name]

It depends on a few factors:
- Most importantly, what does the manufacturer want from you?
- Are these just 2d routed parts or 3/4/5 axis milled?
- Do you have a budget for software/hardware/training/skilled CAD designers?

Personally, if its just 2D routed, i'd use something like Adobe Illustrator to create the outlines.
However they will need to be translated into some sort of machine code, some manufacturers will have frankly ancient machinery running windows 3.1, some will be running state of the art stuff on win10.

So your first step is to talk to manufacturers.

Proper cad/cam software is gloriously expensive - but that should be their problem, not yours.