Is SW a drafting program? - Projections

Quite often I've had a need to display views that are not easily available, eg. isometric view of the underside of a part. The only way I've been able to do this is to update the standard views, to rotate the part to the correct viewing angle that I want, then create a new view, and reset the standard views. This is a real pain, and still does not give me exactly what I want. Maybe there is a macro or add-in to rotate the triad by degree to obtain the correct view? I'm not very good with this stuff, but I have noticed that the cursors can be used to rotate a model by set increments. I'm not sure how large they are, I think its 15deg.

I think it's becoming obvious that most designers are not drafters, and they seem to be the push behind CAD development. For myself it has been years since I used a drawing board, and in some technical colleges in Australia, they don't teach any manual drafting anymore. Many of the fundamentals of drafting are not being passed on to future generations in our schools.

Your view orientation settings will allow you to set the increment by which you rotate with the arrow keys. (default is 15 deg)

With SW2006 and Camera Views you can create anything that can be viewed by your naked eye. Unfortunately older drafting views were created to show more information in an easy to create view than is "naked eye" possible.

Photoshop and SolidWorks together can create all the requested views, however with the ability to "spam" a drawing with 3D views this has become less of an issue.

Cadguru

I'd be curious to know what the common standard is in Australia for drawings. I am of couse being US-centric simply because that is the way I have to work most of the time.

As I noted, dimetric and trimetric views cannot be set exactly. Of the axonometric views, isometric leaves only one choice for orienting the part. Rotate the part 45 degrees about the vertical axis and then tip it forward 35 deg 16 minutes. This results in a unit cube having external edges that make a regular hexagon. A dimetric view is created by using a tip angle of anything but 35 deg 16 minutes. And a trimetric view also varies the 45 degrees rotation. It is not clear just what those other angles are for di & trimetric in SW.

Given the above information, a configuration can be created which two body move features to give a precise rotation of any part into whatever axonometric orientation is needed. Thus, a rotation of 45 degrees about the x axis and then tipping the part forward 35 degrees 16 minutes would give a long isometric projection when viewed from the front.

As a rule, we use ISO standards, Third Angle Projection and Isometric. However, the company I work for has been purchased by a US firm, so we are producing some drawings to ASME standards - I think. We are finding that drawings don't seem to follow any particular standard, and it relies on the discretion of the team producing our Internal CAD standard. They approve the format of our drawings, and we follow that format. A comparison of the ISO or ASME standards with our drawings would show that many items do not follow either standard particularly well. This isn't a big problem, as we've found that most of our suppliers will prepare thier own drawings anyway. It seems that most companies -small ones at least- here decide what suits them without too much regard for international standards. Only the schools and colleges seem to be the ones concerned with getting things correct, and large companies.

Australia and New Zealand use Australian drawing Standards. 3rd Angle projection metric measurement.

AS 1100.101-1992 TECHNICAL DRAWING PART 101: GENERAL PRINCIPLES & AS 1100.201-1992 TECHNICAL DRAWING PART 201: MECHANICAL ENGINEERING DRAWING.

These standards are in compliance with a number of ISO standards.

Most small companies tend to loosely follow the standards, as is the case for most of the companies I work for. Geometric tolerancing is used sparingly as a lot of smaller suppliers charge more as soon as they see them!

I have just completed a job that required drawings to ASME Y14.5M for a supplier to the North American Military. The biggest pain on this job was they also required dual dimensions as the product was designed with mm in mind. Dual dimensions don't really work that well especially with general drawing block tolerances which is what the client wanted (rounding errors being the main issue). Geometric tolerancing was also required, this didn't appear to vary significantly from the ISO standard.

If that ASME job hadn't required me to sign a NDA, I would have asked and paid someone on here to red-line the drawings for me just for my own piece of mind. I hadn't had to think about rigorously following standards since it was required for me to pass exams.

John Layne

TOP,

You mentioned Bertoline, which I assume is referring to the text " Fundamentals of Graphics Communication and Technical Graphics Communication ".

Is this a good reference for such drawing standards? I'm looking for a good one to use.

Thanks, -Pat

It's a textbook. As such it has parts of standards. For the standards themselves go to ANSI, ASME or ISO depending on what you need. What Bertoline does in the book is be thorough and explain. It I became apparent that there were alot of little things missed or glossed over in a lot of the CAD packages. There were also some big things like being able to do all the various projections.

Thanks. I'm looking for good, practical text that will gives a clear explanation of the different types of drawings and the proper way to prepare them. Bertolines text looked like a good possibility as one by Helsel, et al, "Engineering Drawing and Design". So I'll probably take a look at both.

Thanks again, -Pat