11/4 Videos

This set of videos covered how to make dimensions on a drawing. You can do many different measurements including: linear, angular, radius, diameter... Continuous and baseline are the 2 types of dimensions when doing multiple measurements in 1 line. If you don't like the standard dimension settings you can create your own. Autocad makes it easy to edit pre-made dimensions.

11/3 Vidoes

This set of videos covered how to create and edit text. There is 2 types of text, single line for titles and multi-line for everything else. Editing is very similar to Microsoft office 2010 with similar ribbons. Symbols can be found in a separate menu if needed. Autocad has many options for text justification due to the many circumstances you may face. Different preset styles can be created and edited in the text style menu.

Car Project

Finished the car project today. I am still struggling to understand why sometimes the intersection object snap goes past the line and then doesn't let you trim it. Everything else is making sense, even the arcs which were causing me problems before.

10/2

Worked on car. Realized that the computer only does what you tell it to. Yelling at it does not help.

10/1

Worked on car project

Sept 20

Doing the 20 exercises testing the skills learned so far.

Last week of september

Continued to work on Mustang drawing

MD Day 8: Layers

Layers are very useful when creating a multi-object design. Much like in Photoshop layers allow you to work on only a certain part of a design. You can also change the color, line type, or line size of an entire layer at once. Layers are mostly seen when dimensions or other visual aids are used on a drawing.  

MD Day 7

Day 7 of mechanical drawing included a few more "modify" tools and using the grips on objects. The tools included stretching for easier adjustments, mirroring which if very useful for designs such as hotel rooms and scaling objects for when you transfer them from one document to another. Grips are very useful because you can do almost anything using them as you can using modify. The explode/ join options are useful for editing certain parts of an object or making it easier adjust the entire object.

MD Day 6

Day 6 of mechanical drawing focused on moving objects more efficiently, using fillets and champers, and creating arrays. Making rectangular windows if pretty obvious, but you can use the key command "wp" to create irregular polygon windows. Other commands include "L" to select the last object and "P" for the last set of objects. Holding shift is also useful for adding or removing objects from your selection. Fillets are used to create rounded edges on a set of lines. Champers use the same programming as fillets, but creates beveled edges. Arrays are used for creating an object many times in a specifically arranged way. There is rectangular arrays which can be used for something such as office cubical arrangement or rotational arrays which can be used to put chairs around a table as and example.

Day 5 Response: Drawing Shapes

Drawing shapes is very important to industrial design. You can draw rectangles, regular polygons and ellipses simply by choosing the center and side lengths. Drawing polygons is a bit more complicated because you must choose either inscribed or circumscribed. Hatch patterns can also be applied for easier differentiating between shapes.
Once the shapes have been created there are many tools for editing them. This includes changing the dimensions, moving and copying, rotating, trimming, extending, and creating offsets. Most of theses are accessed in the modify panel. Moving, copying, rotating, and creating offsets are as simple as choosing the direction and length. Trimming and extending are a little different, you must first choose the line(s) you want to be the "cutter" and then select the lines you want to cut.

September 5 Response

Day 4 of mechanical drawing focused on coordinates and the object snap tools. The object snap tool is probably the most useful utensil for creating exact geometry. The object snap menu can be accessed by holding shift and right-click. Then you can choose if you want objects to connect to midpoints, endpoints, tangent, perpendicular, and many other options. Automated object snap tools can be found by right clicking on the object snap icon in the toolbar. Then you can select what object snaps you want on all the time. It is not suggested that you have more than 3 object snaps on at once. The objet snaps are nice but to copy designs you may have to draw extra lines. The temporary tracking can be used to speed up the process. Enabled by typing "tk", Temporary tracking is used almost the same as drawing normal lines, but the lines are not seen.

September 4 Response

Day 3 of mechanical drawing involved learning the most common drawing tools on AutoCAD. These tools included constucting lines, locking angles, drawing circles, using the heads-up display and defining a unit. Drawing lines is pretty simple; simply click to start and click to finish. Locking angles is very useful for making exact figures. This can be done using either ortho (90 degree angles) or polar (most other measurments) mode. Drawing circles is simplest by clicking for the center of the circle and then typing the desired radius into the command line, but there are other ways of creating circles for special circumstances. The heads-up display makes for easier angle and length sizing. Units are very important for models and they can be changed by going to: application- drawing utilities- unit.

September 3 Response

Today in the essentials of AutoCAD we went over a large Variety of tools. These included how to open drawings and how to make them easier to find, shortcuts with the mouse, how to pan and zoom faster and how to drag in objects from other documents. Also we learned about templates which are very useful if you have to use the same object on all drawings. Printing is also different in CAD, it requires you to scale the drawings and often change colors to make it easier to read.

September 2 Response

Today I learned about palettes and work spaces. Palettes are panels that you can pull up with specific tools. You can customize what palettes you have and make them easily accessible by anchoring them to the left or right. You can save these settings and other settings found in the options window in a personalized work space. It is possible to have multiple different work spaces if you need to work on multiple projects. The bottom window bar can also be used for easy, common option changes. Any questions you have can be answered in the extensive help guide.