From the course: AutoCAD Mechanical Essential Training

Work with basic editing tools - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Mechanical Essential Training

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Work with basic editing tools

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- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our AutoCAD Mechanical course, so we're going to be looking now at manipulating the mechanical geometry in our drawings. So, we've got a new drawing open for you. It's called Weld_FLANGE001.dwg. You can download it from the library as usual to follow along with the video, and in this video, we're going to be looking at some basic editing tools that are available and just basically make your life a lot easier and more productive when you're using AutoCAD Mechanical. So, go to the Home tab on the ribbon first of all, and we're going to go to the offset command on the Modify panel, so there's offset. Come into the drawing area. It asks you for an offset distance. Go down to the command line and click to get the cursor flashing, and then type five and then what is known as the pipe symbol, which is like that vertical line like that on the keyboard. So normally operated when you press Shift down somewhere on your keyboard. The next number after the pipe symbol is 22.5 and then another pipe symbol. And then I'm going to put in 24 and then another pipe symbol. And then I'm going to put in 39. So what I'm telling AutoCAD Mechanical here is that I want four different offsets at the same time. If I now press Enter to confirm those, it'll prompt me now to select the object to offset. I can use my dynamic input with the pick box to do that, click on the circle, move inside the circle, click again and to finish, there's all my offsets all in one go. Isn't that amazingly quick? Saves a lot of time with the multiple offset distances. We're going to zoom in on this top view here now in our drawing, and you can see that this view hasn't been finished off properly, so we want to join the top group of lines here. Now, I'm going to go to the Modify panel again, click on the flyout and just pin it open. And I want this command here, Join, so it connects non-parallel lines, polylines, arcs and circles. So if I click on Join, it says, select first object. If I select this line here, followed by this line here, it'll join them together. So that closes that gap. Let's do one more. Let's do another join. So I'll do this one here, followed by this one here, and you'll notice, it removes bits of lines as well. Very useful. So that's tidied up that view nice and neatly like so. So what we're going to do now, we're going to do some copying of the view we've just updated. I'm going to put Version 1 and Version 2 over there. So we're just going to copy them straight across just using the intersects of the center lines. So all we need to do there is select all the objects, so what we can do is we can go up here to the Modify panel again and just select the regular Copy, not the Power Copy, but the regular Copy. Just duplicates objects. Select everything. Get it all in the window selection like so. Enter to confirm. I'm going to copy now using the intersection there, and using your polar tracking, just take it across once to there, Version 1, and then over here to Version 2. Click again like so. Enter to finish. So we've got three now. And what we're going to look at now is scaling, and we're going to use the AutoCAD Mechanical scaling tools. Now these are really, really clever. So I'm going to scale in one direction. It's called scale XY, and I'm going to go down to the command line, and I'm going to type in AMSCALEXY. So it's AMSCALE and then XY. Can you see that? Now what you'll find is that this is not available on the Modify panel, you'll find. You have to type it in, so it's AMSCALEXY. So you can select it there on the suggestion menu, and what it will do now is it'll ask you to select the objects. So what we're going to do is we're going to select all of the Version 1 geometry here like so. So click, get all of the geometry including the center lines like that, and then press Enter to confirm. Now we're going to select the midpoint of the vertical center line. So that's going to be right here like that. There you go. So midpoint of vertical center line. Click there. And then what we're going to do when prompted for the scale factors where the X-axis scale factor is going to be 1.25. 1.25, that's the X-axis scale factor. Enter. The Y-axis scale factor is going to be 1.00. When I press Enter, you'll see that it's made it bigger in the X direction. Let's have a go on Version 2 but do it in the Y direction. So I'm going to right click, Repeat AMSCALEXY, select all the objects like so. Like so there. Enter to confirm. Say midpoint again here. So we get that midpoint. Click there. And the X scale factor this time is going to be 1.00, and the Y scale factor will be 0.75. After each one, press Enter, and you'll see that scales in the Y direction. It's really quick and easy to do, so it's AMSCALEXY. When you type that in, it allows you to scale in both the X and the Y direction in separate values so that you can obviously scale in different directions. So there's some basic editing tools for you and also kind of mechanical.

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