G’day aspiring engineers,
Now I’m back on topic. There are four major trends in engineering that affect 2D drawings. I had to point you to James Dyson’s product launch last week, not because I’m getting a kick back on vacuum cleaners but because Sir James is an inventor who pushed through a lot of tough times and made a success of his invention. I’m sure you noticed that he loves what he’s doing.
One more thing before I get on with this, thanks to all of you that have written to me about your interest in 2D drawings since I flagged my intention to cover the topic here. I value the feedback and its something I hope to get more of.
So back to drawings. Oh, and by the way, did you see the hand drawn sketches in Dyson’s promo? There he was showing the very latest in a world class design organisation and there were hand drawn sketches in the process. Yes, drawings. Fusion 360 is a world class, up to date piece of software, it has a 3D modelling workspace and it has a few other workspaces, surfacing, animation, rendering, sheet metal and then there are plugins and other ways to extend the functions of Fusion 360 such as exporting your 3D model and importing it into other software programs.
Trend number 1.
It wasn’t so long ago that most CAD was 2D and your whole drawing activity was focused on the 2D drawing that you would soon print off on a large format printer. Now though, we spend our time making a 3D model and in a modern mechanical CAD program like Fusion 360 we can take that model and generate orthogonal views almost automatically. We can detail our drawing with the dimensions we choose to show and whatever other detailed information is needed by the person or business that we intend to send our drawing to. That’s the first big trend I need to mention, 2D drawings come from the 3D model as one of a number of uses that the 3D model serves in our design process….