AutoCAD Mechanical 2009
Published Mon 19 May 2008
While AutoCAD 2009 is a great generic drafting tool, the vertical flavour of AutoCAD, AutoCAD Mechanical, knows a lot more about engineering standards, features and design. It’s Autodesk’s best-kept secret writes Martyn Day.
AutoCAD Mechanical features a vast library of standard parts some of which can be stored as favourites for easy retrieval.
The development of AutoCAD in the early eighties ushered in the benefits of Computer Aided Design to all design-related businesses. CAD was a digital replacement for the drawing board and offered productivity benefits, especially when changes needed to be made. However, these 2D drawing systems really only offered lines, circles and arcs, and no expert knowledge of engineering.
Over time Autodesk started to acquire thirdparty developers that had built engineering knowledge on top of AutoCAD and the company launched ‘vertical’ flavours of AutoCAD to tailor extended capabilities to numerous design markets. One of the first to come out from Autodesk was AutoCAD Mechanical, a powerful 2D AutoCAD for engineers. With the rush to 3D modelling and a lot of industry hype, AutoCAD Mechanical lost some of the spotlight and it was bundled into the Inventor Suite of products as a powerful 2D documentation portion for those people more at home with the AutoCAD interface. It also acknowledged that not every part needed to be modelled and detailed in 3D.
Mechanical advantage
To revisit AutoCAD Mechanical with the launch of this 2009 release and read through the products complete capabilities, one can’t help but be impressed – it is incredibly feature rich.
The software has a very thick layer of additional functions over vanilla AutoCAD, offering a massive standards-based drafting and part library, a host of machinery generators and calculators, additional design and productivity tools, data management and BOM generators, built-in error checking and file compatibility and associativity with Autodesk Inventor.
AutoCAD Mechanical supports ANSI, BSI, CSN, DIN, GB, ISO, GOST and JIS drafting environments. The software’s part libraries cover a wide range of standard parts, including screw, washer and nut connections and compound assemblies. Once placed inside a design these are all added into the Bill of Materials (BOM).
The software contains over 11,000 pre-drawn standard structural steel shapes and there is also a host of configurable title and revision bocks.
In terms of machinery generators and calculators, AutoCAD Mechanical has an extensive Spring Generator that lets you calculate and insert all sorts of standard and non-standard spring types. There’s a shaft generator for solid and hollow shafts, with centre holes, chamfers, cones, grooves, gears, seals etc. The Shaft generator automatically creates side views and can validate compatibility with graphs and tables.
Optimal belts and chain systems can be quickly created based on engineering calculations, with the geometry being derived from the standard symbol library. Linear, circular and cylindrical Cams can also be designed and analysed. AutoCAD Mechanical also has a powerful ‘Moments of Inertia’, Deflection and Load calculator, with the user indicating forces and supports. There’s also as an easy to use 2D FEA (Finite Element Analysis) solution in the system.
The 2D drawing toolbar extends AutoCAD’s drafting feature set with more than 30 additional options, with specialty linetypes and hatches.
There’s a clever 2D hide based on layers and the Power Dimensions and Snaps super-charge AutoCAD’s standard dimensioning and control capabilities. There’s also a comprehensive constructionline generator, together with ‘instant’
Fit Lists and extended paper Space capabilities. AutoCAD Mechanical’s automatic BOM generation and configuration is really quite excellent.
The system also automatically produces hole charts, which update as the design is altered.
As one would expect, AutoCAD Mechanical is completely compatible with Inventor, DWG and DWF and works with Autodesk’s Vault document management system, as well as the company’s broader industry solution for document management and distribution, ProductStream.
What’s new?
AutoCAD Mechanical 2009 is built on top of AutoCAD 2009 and shares in the benefits of the foundation release including the changes to the User Interface. However, there is one difference and that’s the ‘Ribbon’ menu interface in vanilla AutoCAD 2009, which has not been adopted in this version of AutoCAD Mechanical.
This decision was made to ease the transition from previous versions of Mechanical and it will be supported in the next release.
The new Mechanical Layer management tool allows powerful manipulation of layer settings and layer definitions. Autodesk has spent considerable effort to ease the transition of vanilla AutoCAD users to some of the more specific properties and layer definition commands that are in AutoCAD Mechanical.
The Standards symbols have seen additions for complex welding and leader notes and the GOST standards have been added to the symbol libraries. With over 70,000 standard parts sometimes it can require a lot of effort to locate a required part, but with the new ‘favourites’ capability commonly used parts can be stored for easy retrieval.
The most visual addition is to the Associative hide for blocks. Using a clever layering system, hidden 2D lines are automatically generated from ‘overlapping’ block geometry. Here, AutoCAD Mechanical and standard AutoCAD geometry will automatically change to hidden line depending if geometry is ‘In front’ layer-wise.
Conclusion
AutoCAD Mechanical is an incredibly powerful and mature product for design generation and detailing, offering an absolute wealth of 2D Engineering capability. If you don’t see yourself moving to a 3D solution straight away (or ever) and create simple or complex engineering drawings, which use standard parts, or refer to an engineering handbook and/or generate Bills of Materials (BOMs), then AutoCAD Mechanical 2009 wins hands down over using vanilla AutoCAD. It really is ‘a no brainer’, as they say.
