I had a customer the other day who was looking for some standard parts to add to his SOLIDWORKS assemblies and the only information he could find was 2D data when doing internet searches. I asked him if he had heard of 3D ContentCentral and being that he was a newer SOLIDWORKS user, he had not.
Once he went to the 3D ContentCentral site he was amazed at all the items he couldn’t find in any of his other searches. 3D ContentCentral literally has millions of models, there are hundreds of different vendors who have their entire catalog of files. There is also a huge library of quality user supplied content as well that users have added to the site. The best part is all of the models are FREE to download once you create an account.
In personally using 3D ContentCentral I have found it is very easy to use there is variety of models and you can find anything from a AA Battery to Scooby-Doo.
Both the customer and user library are highly detailed models and a lot have multiple configurations and can even download then in different CAD formats and versions so they can be used anywhere.
So, the next time you are looking for that hard to find part more than likely is has already been created and is available on 3D ContentCentral.