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Monday, November 16, 2009

My S.E. Mechanical AutoCAD drawings

As an Engineer student the 1 thing I like the most is the drawing. Be it for journals, design sheets or simply answering theoretical questions – there is a lot to draw [and on not few occasions re-draw :-)]. Drawing is something I never get tired to doing – be it fine arts till school or now the truckloads of Engineering drawings. So it hardly comes as surprise to any that subjects that don’t have any significant drawings or diagrams [aka Industrial Engineering & Management, Electrical Technology] to draw are the one that I have a near-nightmarish time clearing.

As far as Engineering drawing go the Second year was the most undoubtedly fun. We had to complete 16 full imperial-sheet drawings that year. It included 4 sheets for TOM-I. Funny thing was that as the years progressed the number of drawings sheets progressively decreased. This Final year we barely had to draw two sheets & possibly the last two sheets of 2-D drafting of our Engineering career, ‘cause as people were saying next semester we would be working on 3D Modeling software, Inventor in our case.

The Second Year was also the first year, we had to do 2D drafting as part of the curriculum & plot them on full-imperial sized sheets. As the first sheet started emerging from the plotter showing the partially printed drawings we were gripped with a near sense of excitement & [as far as the Second Year was concerned] a sense of achievement for having roughed it out with AutoCAD trying to figure out the features to perform required tasks & finally coming out triumphs [okay it, on hindsight, may sound like a hyperbolic reaction, but in S.E it felt like a perfectly normal reaction].

On holding the first sheet that emerged from the plotter, one would probably have found it perfectly alright if someone had shouted out, “Congratulations! it’s an AutoCAD drawing!”. But no one did. Maybe if I’d seen the movie then, I‘d have done the honors :).

Of the 16 sheets, 4 had to be made using a drafting software, while the remaining 12 had to be done by hand – drafter, drawing boards et al.

Was searching for something on the loft, where I found all the sheets each binded neatly for convenience of the external examiner who would conduct a 10 minute oral examination among three of us students seated, often not even checking out each persons sheets, who would then determine my fate in that particular oral & evaluate the effort I had put [or not put] in the past 6 months for that particular subject.

As it turns out, I also kept the original soft copes of my drawings. Uploading them, just for the heck of it actually ;). Check it out.

Click on the image to view a larger-sized image (uploaded as original A0 size – Picasa screwing it up)

S.E Mechanical Engineering AutoCAD Drawings - Standard Machine Components

Standard Machine components

S.E Mechanical Engineering AutoCAD Drawings - Standard Machine Components

Standard Machine components

S.E Mechanical Engineering AutoCAD Drawings - Cotter and Knuckle Joint Assembly

Cotter & Knuckle Joint Assembly

S.E Mechanical Engineering AutoCAD Drawings - Cotter and Knuckle Joint Details

Cotter and Knuckle Joint Details

P.S: Okay so I do know that calling them AutoCAD drawings is not quite the most correct term to use. But just as all photo-copies are called Xerox even if made on a Canon machine & chocolate most often referred to as Cadbury even if manufactured by Nestle here in India, so also is all Computer-Aided 2D Drafting are called AutoCAD drawings. At least as far as 2D drafting goes, it is not quite incorrect to call it AutoCAD drawings as in all these years studying Engineering I’m yet to come across anybody who uses any other software for drafting [me fiddling around with Solid Edge’s Free 2D only recently, though I’d still go back to AutoCAD for any college work]. Me has absolutely no plans of taking on the world [or my classmates for that matter] to convert them in to calling the drawings by its correct description.

Colloquialism Rules!

Godspeed