Subtitles of the Movie

In this particular drawing we're going to use some of the AutoCAD basic Geometry Commands such as Line, Circle, Arc, rectangle and Polygon and we're going to create a simple mechanical bracket. Now some good housekeeping to get into before you start drafting, always do a Zoom All. So that's over here on the Home Tab, click on the Utilities Panel, click on the Down Arrow there and select Zoom All from the Zoom Commands. Then always make sure that your Drafting Settings are set, these are down at the bottom of the screen here. I've got mine set to the little buttons with the words on them as per the old versions of AutoCAD, if you right click over one of these though you can go to Use Icons on the Shortcut Menu and the icons appear. Vice Versa, if I right click on icon and click on Use Icons the buttons with the words are back on. Now make sure that you have Polar, O-Snap, O-Track and Dynamic switched on. In this case I don't need DUCS, Dynamic UCS, that's for 3D drafting. So if you look at my settings there down on the status bar right now, that is what they should be set to. Now we need the Draw Panel as well, that's on the Home Tab, click on the Triangle here to Expand the Draw Panel, click on the Pin to lock it open just in case we need any of the Drafting Commands on the Draw Panel. We're now going to click on the Line Command up here, so I'm clicking on the Line Command and it's asking me for the first point of my line. I'm actually going to an input an Absolute Coordinate. Now its very easy as you can see, I've got Coordinate Input on the Dynamic Input there. So in the first box highlighted in blue I type in 100, that is my X Coordinate. Now I can either hit the Tab Key or the Comma Key to go to the Y Coordinate. So if I hit the Tab Key, tabs across, I could also have hit the Comma Key on the keyboard and the Y Coordinate is going to be 50, again type that in and when you press Enter now you'll find that your line actually starts from that Coordinate, 100 comma 50. Now the X and Y over there in the left hand corner are indicative, they do not indicate the origin, hence why it looks a bit strange and looks like you've gone at further in the X direction then you think you have. The Y and the X at the moment are just showing the direction of the Y and X, their not showing where the 00, the origin is. Now, we need to draw a line that is 100 long to the right. So it needs to be 100 long and in the 0 degrees direction to the right, horizontally. Now you'll notice we've actually got Distance Input there at the moment highlighted in blue so we type 100 in, in the Distance Box and then hit the Tab Key. That tabs us across to our Angle Input which needs to be 0 degrees. If I press that Tab Key again it locks both of those down, doesn't mean to say I can't change them, but their locked down. So what I need to do there now is just left click once to accept that on the mouse and there's my first line segment. This is where I can really, really cheat now. I've got the Polar Tracking to use to my advantage. You'll notice when I drag upwards now look it locks off at 90 degrees. I drag upwards and in the Distance Box I know the line needs to be a 100 long, I type in 100 and I just press Enter, AutoCAD knows the angle already. So there's my 90 degree line. I drag to the left now with the cross hair, notice the Polar is locked in at a 180 degrees in the Distance Box I type in 25 and press Enter. I've drawn a line now 25 units long at 180 degrees. I drag downwards now and get the Polar Tracking locking off at 270 degrees, I type in 50 as the distance, press Enter and there's my line segment of 50 units long. Now, I just press Enter one more time and that closes out the Line Command. So there's the first part of my bracket already drawn, that's the right hand side of it, drawn. So the next step now is for me to draw the left hand side. Now again, another nice little cheat here is to utilize Object Snaps. It's not really a cheat as such, but the Object Snaps allow me to draft more quickly. So I go back to Line Command, now remember I've just finished Line Command, another little hint here if you hit the Spacebar or the Enter Key it repeats the last command that you used. So if I hit the Spacebar now its asking me for the first point of my next new line segment. I'm going to hover the crosshair near this end point here because I've got Object Snaps on it finds the end point of that line immediately. So I left click on the End Point Snap and my line now starts exactly from the end of that horizontal line. Again now I can cheat, I can utilize my Polar Tracking by going upwards up the 90 degree line, its locked off at 90 degrees, I type 100 in the box and I press Enter. I drag to the right this time for the left hand part of my bracket and again the distance is 25 in the box, I'm locked off at 0 degrees this time because I'm going to the right horizontally, press Enter, there's my next line segment. I then drag downwards, locked off with a 270 with the Polar Tracking, type in 50 as the distance in the Distance Box, press Enter once, that confirms the 50 distance, press Enter again, it closes out the Line Command. There's our bracket starting to take shape. I'm now just going to utilize very quickly the Zoom and Pan on the mouse. I'm going to roll up on the wheel to zoom in a couple notches like that and then going to hold down the wheel on the mouse as if it were a button, my little pan symbol, my hand symbol appears there. I'm just going to pan that a little bit into the center of the screen. Now I need to draw an Arc. Now the good things about Arcs is they follow the AutoCAD counterclockwise rule. Now by default this drawing we haven't changed any of those units so the counter clockwise rule will apply. So I need to draw an Arc from this point here to this point here on the end of this line here. So let's do that, let's go to the Arc Command. Now let's think about this, I've got a start point of my Arc, I've got an end point of my Arc and I know that the 2 ends of those lines there are on a horizontal plane. So I've actually got an included angle there that I could include and that angle is 180 degrees. Now the good thing about the Arc Command is there's lots of different variations. So if I now go to the Arc Command here and click on the Down Arrow, I've got lots of different Arcs I can choose from and in true blue Peter fashion here's one I prepared earlier, start end angle. If I click on Start End Angle, all it will prompt me for now is the start point, the end point and the angle that the Arc has to go through. So it prompts now for the start point of the Arc, I now click on this end point here, left click, I move in a counterclockwise direction to the end of my Arc here, left click, it now prompts me for an included angle. Make sure you just drop your crosshairs in between those two vertical lines there. When you specify the angle that way AutoCAD knows where the angle is going. OK you can see the Arc beginning to take shape, so when it looks like the way you want it to look, that's when you specify the included angle which is a 180 degrees, half of a circle, self explanatory, press Enter and there's my Arc.