I'm in mechanical engineering as well, and when I want to use something more close to home, I use Autodesk Inventor, which makes it easy to share models with 3dsmax.
I know that Catia also sort of works, but since Inventor is much easier to get a hold of anyway, I prefer Inventor.
Though if you only want to model statics, then I would go straight for 3dsmax, mostly I just model in CAD first when I'm making a very high-poly model that I'll later use to bake down into more detailed textures.