Engineering project: Part drawing

- In this video we'll be gaining some practice with this mechanical drawing project. We'll be drawing this missing view. Let's begin by turning on some running Object Snaps. Click the arrow, then turn on Endpoint, Midpoint, Center, Quadrant, Intersection, and Perpendicular. Let's also turn on Object Snap Tracking and Ortho and leave Dynamic Input on. Draw a line and acquire a tracking point from this Endpoint.

Acquire another tracking point over here, and move back and find their intersection. Then acquire a point like this and then come over here and acquire a point up here and so on. In this way you can sketch in the overall form of what the front view must look like. I notice over here in the right view that this part of the object goes down so I need to account for that.

I'll draw another line and acquire this point and this one and find their intersection. Now judging from this area it looks like this portion spans the whole object so I can copy this line here over there and then I'll draw in another line across the bottom. Now it looks like this is a kind of tower that sticks up judging from this diagram on the right.

So I need to acquire a point. And I notice there's a gap here that we should fix later. I'll draw this down. And in this case because I didn't use tracking I need to then trim off this piece. I'd like to fix that by using fillet. I'll type f + enter. I'll click these two lines to join them together. And then I will go ahead and copy these two lines from here to here.

It looks like there's a baseplate here that we need to account for. So let's draw a line over like that and then these should be cut off. So we will trim, press enter to accept all edges as boundaries. And then just click those three segments to get rid of them. Now it doesn't look like this is quite correct over here. Let me fillet this line and this line, and I join them together, again here and here.

So that's starting to look better. I notice that there is this strange dashed line here. I think that's a weld and it's probably similar to the curvature of this one and it's going to be right over here. So I'm going to mirror this object about a mirror line which is let's just approximate it, right about here. And that didn't quite hit it but it's close. I'll move this over now, m + enter.

I'll grab it from the end point and move it perpendicular there. That looks good. Okay, what about this object. What is that? It's a hole that goes through this plate. So I'm going to draw a line, and I will acquire a tracking point from this quadrant and I will draw it down here. And again over here. Like so. Now this is the hole in the right view. So the hole is going to be radially symmetric.

It's going to be the same over here as it is over here. So I should be able to copy all of this over grabbing it from this end point and placing it there. It fits. So we can go ahead and erase these two lines. So we're on the right track. Okay, what's left? We have this curve. We could probably represent that with a line like that, to show where that radiused transition ends and then again, over here.

Now we have a circle on the side and that's going to cut through this plate on the side, so we need to represent that with a dashed line. I'm going to draw a line acquiring from this quadrant like that, and from over here, like so. Now these two lines, this one and this one, are hidden in this particular view so they need a different line type.

I'll change that right here on the Properties panel to HIDDEN and then press escape. And it looks from up here like this is a hole that goes through both sides so I need to copy that over here like this. There's also a hole in the back and it looks a lot like it's the same diameter as this hole. Let's just check that out. I'm going to copy this hole from its quadrant point, turn off ortho by pressing F8, and I'm going to put it right there on the midpoint and sure enough it's right on the right size.

The problem is, is it doesn't show me in this diagram where that is. I'm going to guess that it's at the same height. I'm going to move this down and acquire a tracking point there and put it right there. Now I could improve this diagram by showing where that hole would be in this side. So I'm going to copy these two lines here and put them over here. Now that's a thicker plate so I have to extend these lines to meet this one.

So I can use the Extend command or I could just use Trim press enter and then hold down shift, and that inverts Trim to make it work just like Extend. So there we have it. Now what are we missing? I think down here we have another hole. And that's not shown up here either. Again I'm going to have to kind of design the part because not enough information is given. So I'm going to copy this circle, enter, from its lower quadrant and I want to acquire a tracking point here and place it right there.

Again we should improve this diagram with this information of where this hole goes and we'll do that up here. I'll copy these two lines and make them perpendicular there. And it looks like I need to extend them just a little bit. This time I'll explicitly use Extend. Press enter to select all objects as potential boundaries and then click, click, enter. So let's see. It's coming together. I don't think there are any problems.

Maybe I could trim away this little bit here. I could do that either with Trim or with Fillet zero. Let's take the latter approach. F enter, the radius is 0.0000, you can read that right there, and I'll click this arc and this line. That looks a little cleaner. So there you have it. The front view of this mechanical part. This should give you some practice and challenge you to solve problems as you encounter them.