ruffrecords
Well-known member
As many of you know, I struggle with mechanics but I recently decided it was about time I made the effort to get to grips with 2D CAD. I have always been a great believer that nothing is too complex to understand as long as you can break it down into a series of smaller steps and understand each one of those. Until today I had been unable to do that for 2D CAD. I am not trying to draw anything really complex, but the things I do want to draw (end profiles for a mixer frames) do have lines at odd angles and holes all over the place related to those angles. For a long time I laboured under the misapprehension that I had to work out the x,y coordinates of each and every one and use them as input to the CAD program - basically the CAD was little better than pencil and paper.
Well, after watching a bunch of tutorials today, I finally began to grok 2D CAD as a tool that can actually make my life easier. The key to it was one tutorial where the guy started using lots of construction lines in order to draw a quite complicated shape without any complex math to work out x,y points - he used the CAD to do it for him. They key is the objects he wanted were simple distances and angles from lines or points he already had drawn.
Here is a link to part 3 of a series of tutorials by Adrian Cherry where it first began to make sense to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NObykYf-mqM
Cheers
Ian
Well, after watching a bunch of tutorials today, I finally began to grok 2D CAD as a tool that can actually make my life easier. The key to it was one tutorial where the guy started using lots of construction lines in order to draw a quite complicated shape without any complex math to work out x,y points - he used the CAD to do it for him. They key is the objects he wanted were simple distances and angles from lines or points he already had drawn.
Here is a link to part 3 of a series of tutorials by Adrian Cherry where it first began to make sense to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NObykYf-mqM
Cheers
Ian
