G'Day Clive,
I use Autocad and Solidworks at work, but I have Freecad and Google Sketchup at home.
Sketchup has a very intuitive interface (says he who has been using CAD for years
) which makes the first part of the learning curve easier. I'm still just playing with the free version at home, but the Pro version is very reasonably priced. If I decide to use it in preference to Freecad, I'll upgrade to Pro. There are some clunky limitations in Sketchup, for example, no flexible mirror operation built in. There are workarounds, and allegedly there is an addin for it, but I wasn't able to download it.
Freecad is quite clunky relative to say Solidworks, but then you're comparing free software to a multi-thousand dollar package.
The assembly module for Freecad is still not developed, but its happening - that may not be important to what you want to do, I don't know.
For home use 3D modelling, I would recommend either Freecad or Sketchup, but while they are both good for CAD, I'm not aware that either has a CAM capability, so you might still be looking for something else to produce your code for your CNC machine.
As for free/cheap FEA software, have a look at LISA FET. The free version has a limit of 1300 nodes, and it's surprising what you can do within that limitation for structural stuff, but it may be a bit limiting for valid analysis of a detailed machined part. The full licence is about $100, which I recently got. You can export either IGES or STEP files from Freecad to LISA for meshing and analysis (I have done this) and in theory you should be able to do the meshing in Freecad and just analyse in LISA, but I haven't tried that yet.
Al.