Bricscad (www.bricsys.com) is a professional (paid) cad package that has most of what you're looking for. They're old-school perpetual license folks and they have a fully featured demo so you can try out the various scripting/programmatic options for a bit. No relation except as a user, but if you're willing to pay it's probably your easiest path forward.
If you're ever in Edinburgh, this is an excellent place to visit and spend an afternoon. One of the funniest parts was upon walking in the door, the gentleman who greeted me asked "What kind of engineer are you?" Very worthwhile.
Shamefully, I grew up in Edinburgh, am an EE, my Dad was an EE, also lived in Edinburgh, and I never knew there was a Maxwell house there. I suppose I assumed he only lived on his estate or in Cambridge. There's a statue of him at the end of George St also.
Ha, kind of makes sense though. I can’t remember where I heard it but there’s a quote about him being the greatest scientist the average person has never heard of or something like that.
It's getting much tougher to pull this off - I recently had an offer for a cherry government job but it was in southern California. The salary, while competitive for most locations, would've required me to be independently wealthy to live within an hour of the office in order to buy even a modest home.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History (episode 1: https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supern...) recently did a great series "Supernova in the East" on the modernization of Japan and the internal politics. If you've got some time (drive or such), it's well worth the listen and there's a great diversity of sources.
They certainly haven't made this mistake in any late-model F-x50 Super Duties. The amount that has to be unplugged and shuffled to do even minor work is amazing, not to mention the entire front end has to be disassembled to replace the headlight bulbs.
Hopefully this will usher in some 'common sense' engineering at Ford and other manufacturers and get them back to sane and serviceable designs.
Anybody seen similar hardware out of aluminum or coated steel or stainless that's also readily USA-available? Machining these could be done on a small lathe and single-sided CNC...
