X

Email this page to a friend

Complete all fields in the form below and we will email the details of this page to your friend on your behalf.

My Name
Friend's Name
Message
Please send me a copy of the email
Manufacturing solutions
Main menu

send to friend

Why move to AutoCAD Mechanical?

To compete and win in today’s design market, drafters and designers need to create and revise mechanical designs faster than ever before. AutoCAD® Mechanical software, part of the AutoCAD® product family you already know and trust, saves countless hours of design and rework by automating many common tasks that must be done manually in AutoCAD. As a result,designers gain a competitive edge and can spend their time innovating rather than struggling through manual workflows.

Here are 10 good reasons to move to AutoCAD Mechanical:

1) 700,000 Standard Parts and Features

When you’re dealing with machinery that contains hundreds or thousands of parts, it could take days, even weeks, to draw them from scratch. AutoCAD Mechanical changes that by providing a comprehensive set of parts and
features that you can select for your designs. When content is inserted, AutoCAD Mechanical intelligently cleans up the surrounding geometry
so you don’t have to edit it manually.

Examples include:
  • Screws, Nuts, Washers
  • Pins, Rivets, Bushings
  • Plugs, Lubricators, Sealing Rings
  • Bearing and Shaft Components
  • Structural Steel Shapes
  • Through, Tapped, Blind, and Oblong Holes
  • Undercuts, Keyways, and Thread Ends

    		• Facing these issues


    • Your current 2D software is limiting your productivity?
    • Outdated design practices creating hours of manual rework?
    • Design errors and incorrect BOMs and parts lists are keeping products from shipping on time?
    • Updating existing drawings is costing your company valuable time?
    • Inconsistent use of drafting standards is slowing down your production team?
    • Inability to find and reuse designs is forcing your design team to create too many designs from scratch




    2) Extended toolbars for Manufacturing

    AutoCAD Mechanical provides additional options over basic AutoCAD software for drawing creation. Included are:

    • More than 30 options for rectangle, arc, and circle creation
    • Semi-automatic centreline creation and updating
    • Speciality lines for break out views and section lines
    • A full suite of construction lines for aligning drafting views
    • Manufacturing focused hatching patterns and sizes

    3) Powerful & Smart Dimensions

    With the streamlined tools in AutoCAD Mechanical, you can create dimensions using abbreviated dialog boxes that conveniently control and expand only the relevant variables for manufacturing.  With automatic dimensioning, you can create multiple dimensions
    with minimal input,resulting in instant groups of ordinate, parallel, or symmetric items that are appropriately spaced.  Smart dimensioning tools force overlapping dimensions to automatically space themselves appropriately while integrating tolerance and fit list information into the design.  Dimension input can even drive and change design geometry to fit certain sizes.

    4) Reusable Detailing Tools

    Built to save you time, AutoCAD Mechanical has a specific tool for almost every aspect of the mechanical drafting process. Many of these drafting tools have the intelligence that helps users easily re-edit features without having to remove and recreate the original feature. For example, a chamfer or fillet can be easily re-sized through the original dialog parameters by simply double clicking on the chamfer or fillet. The list of tools includes, but is not limited to:

    • Detail Views – easily create linked views at different scales
    • Hole Charts – automatically updated charts for the shop floor
    • Scale Areas – change drawing scale without making duplicate copies
    • Title and Revision Blocks – English and metric versions available

    5) International Drafting Standards

    Multiply your productivity with tools that help you and your team deliver consistent, standards-based design documentation. AutoCAD Mechanical supports ANSI, BSI, CSN, DIN, GB, ISO, and JIS drafting environments. Adhering to a standard environment helps your team maintain a common form of communication for consistent production results. AutoCAD Mechanical includes drafting tools to create standards-based surface texture symbols, geometric dimensioning and tolerances, datum identifiers and targets, notes, taper and slope symbols, and weld symbols.

    6) Associative Balloons and Bill of Materials (BOMs)

    Create automated and associative part lists and BOMs that are specifically developed for manufacturing and that automatically update as the design changes. Included is support for multiple parts lists per drawing, collapsible assemblies, automatic recognition of standard parts, and customizable options so features can be revised to match current
    company practices.  Change a design once; and updates ripple through the entire drawing to keep everyone on schedule, reducing costly stops in production from incorrect part counting,identification, and ordering. You can export or link BOM data to manufacturing resource planning (MRP), enterprise resource planning(ERP) systems, or data management systems like Autodesk® Productstream® software.  

    7) Layer Management

    The intelligent layer management system in AutoCAD Mechanical automatically places items on the correct layer, colour, and linetype as you create your drawing. And, it can be easily customized based on your company requirements.

    8) Hidden Lines

    Ramp up your productivity by defining simple foreground and background selections that automatically redraw geometry to show hidden or dashed lines of parts that are obstructed by other parts in your design. The hidden lines automatically update when changes occur, virtually eliminating the time required to manually redraw geometry due to iterative changes.
    For the first time in 2D, identical parts can have different geometrical appearances when in hide situations, but AutoCAD Mechanical knows they are still identical parts if you need to change the design or get an accurate count for the parts list. This means you’ll spend less time and effort updating your 2D designs.

    9) Machinery Generators & Calculators

    If you are building mechanisms from paper catalogs and manual calculations, the comprehensive machinery generator and calculator tools can be a huge time-saver. Built into the application environment,these tools are extremely helpful when making small, iterative changes to improve your design.
    They not only create parts according to your specifications, but they also create all of the reports and calculations you need to analyze the design. AutoCAD Mechanical includes shaft, spring, belt, chain, and cam generators.

    10) Data Exchange between CAD Systems

    Use AutoCAD Mechanical to detail and document native Autodesk®InventorTM parts and assemblies. Incorporate design revisions quicklyand easily through the associative link - the software willautomatically notify you of changes to the Inventor file and regeneratethe 2D drawing, including any changes. AutoCAD Mechanical also includesthe industry- standard IGES (Initial Graphics Exchange Specification)format for exchanging data between dissimilar CAD systems.