From the course: AutoCAD Mechanical Essential Training

Create a mechanical drawing using structure - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Mechanical Essential Training

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Create a mechanical drawing using structure

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- [Instructor] We're staying in our ROBOT001.dwg file and we're going to have a look now at creating a mechanical drawing using structure. Now we're going to imagine that we're that we're still developing our robot here that we've got in our AutoCAD Mechanical drawing. Now I'm not going to create an entire mechanical drawing from scratch, that would take hours, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a small element called a shield, and that's going to form part of our drawing structure. So I'm going to zoom in on the basement part of the front view here, so I'm going to get in nice and tight like so, and I'm going to make sure I'm on the AM0 layer there, in the layers panel in the home tab on the ribbon. And all I'm going to draw is a very simple little rectangle to represent a shield at the back of the basement where the robot rotates. So I'm going to go to the rectangle command in the draw panel, just literally select regular rectangle, that one there, so rectangle, corner to corner, you'll notice in the drop down, there's lots of different rectangles in AutoCAD Mechanical, so I'm going to go for this one here. And I'm just going to pick a point, drag it upwards like so, and then I'm just going to hover and use my object snap tracking just to get the thickness there, and just take it up to say there. Now I'm doing this very randomly, I hasten to add, you'd obviously draw this a lot more accurately. But that is now a new rectangle in the drawing, so in go over to the mechanical browser, right click on robot 001 and go new, component, so that's going to be a new component of this assembly for the robot 001. So I select component, like so, and it says enter new component name, and obviously you get a default of COMP1. Now I'm going to call it shield, and it might be the shield at the back, so make sure you spell it right, i before e except after c. There's shield there and press enter to confirm. Now you have a new view name, now the default is top, now this isn't top this is front, so you make sure that you type front in rather that accept the top one, and you select the object for the new component view which is going to be there like so, and then you press enter to confirm, like so, and then you specify a base point, now this is important because you might want to reuse this structured data later on, so my base point is going to be that bottom left corner of the rectangle just there. Now what you've got, if you look now at your mechanical browser, is a new component, shield one front view. Now if I zoom out here, obviously you'd have a shield down here somewhere as well, as you can see that bit sticks out there and it's this bit here that where the shield is sitting on, just here, this rectangular but here. So what you might do there now is create another rectangle, down here, so let's do another rectangle, and I'll do it corner to corner again, so endpoint to endpoint like so, so I've got my rectangle sitting on top there and again I'm going to go to robot, right click, and I want new, component, or do I now? Do I need a new component or do I need a new view? I can go down to shield and I can now go new, component view. Select the view name, so this will be top now, like so, select component like so, click there and enter finish, base point, we'd probably go with something like an intersection there like that. So now we've got a front and a top, now if I just do a double click on the wheel to zoom extents and just pan upwards a little bit so that we can see them, there's my front view there, there's my top view there, and what I've done is I've generated that structure as if I was generating a new AutoCAD Mechanical drawing from scratch but I've obviously only added two components, but that's how you build up all of those components to make that structure in your AutoCAD Mechanical drawing.

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