[Andy L]

I agree with you about the use of inventor being hard to learn in some cases, I've taught myself about electronics, HTML, PHP, a bit of C, and Solidworks, but inventor evaded my abilities.

We've used sketch up before on a few things, but found that a few hours of Solidworks training gave us about the same result, and Solidworks works very well for our team.

I swear by Solidworks and love using it, I taught myself in a few hours how to make basic parts and the rest just came with experimenting.

I know Solidworks offers free Student versions to teams if you want the link I'll try to hunt it down.