In the engineering world, drawings are king. There’s no doubt 3D CAD models may look great, but without CAD drawings, many of those fancy 3D models would be hard to manufacture. To create a drawing, you no longer have to spend hours at a drafting table with your pencils, triangles, scales, and erasers. But while your drawing tools may have changed, the techniques that guided you should often stay the same.

Whether you’re an experienced drafter or you’re just getting started, this white paper will help you learn or refine basic drafting techniques to help you improve the manufacturability of your CAD drawings, including:

• Focusing on clarity, precision and accuracy
• Spending time on your templates
• Creating personalized tables and callouts
• Creating models with drawings in mind

Regardless of your engineering discipline – mechanical, architectural, welding, molding, casting, structural, civil – CAD drawings have a common purpose: to convey information on how a part, structure or assembly is to be produced. In order to enable production, you must have clear, precise drawings that are easy to interpret. In layman’s terms, drafting standards still matter. Modern design solutions have an arsenal of tools to create incredible drawings – automatic view creation, auto-dimensioning, parts-lists templates, title-block templates, section-view commands, auxiliary-view commands, tolerance analysis and more.

But the ease-of-use of these tools can cause the user to underestimate the technical knowledge needed to use them properly. Regardless of the software or technology used, even seemingly minor errors – an arrow pointing in the wrong direction or a misplaced view – can cause major issues in manufacturability. Detailed, accurate drawings are less likely to be misinterpreted, which means it is less likely they will cause the costly re-manufacture of parts.

Download the white paper today to learn techniques for streamlining the creation of production-ready CAD drawings.

CAD Drawings BOM

CAD Drawing Techniques