Engineering is a unique discipline whose practitioners collaboratively manipulate material, energy, and information to create solutions to humanity’s challenges. As a creative discipline, engineering involves generating new designs, evaluating alternatives, and making decisions under constraints. As a collaborative discipline, it necessarily involves a great deal of communication—with colleagues, with clients, and with the public. Since many mechanical engineering solutions involve manufacture of physical components, graphical communication is an essential skill. This text is meant to accompany an introductory course on engineering graphics and design. It is not meant to be comprehensive, either with respect to the entire field or individual topics, but instead to serve as an introduction to topics that will be explored in more depth during class time.
Modern tools, modern skills
Computer-aided design has almost completely replaced traditional pen-and-paper techniques for creating engineering drawings. Many once-essential skills like proper pencil technique for drawing straight lines and curves or proper line weights have become obsolete for most engineers. Software automatically enforces these basic drafting standards, and I believe they should not be taught or evaluated in a modern engineering course.
However, modern software does not (yet) automate the proper selection and placement of appropriate views (other than enforcing basic alignment), or placement and organization of dimensions. This text assumes that students are using 3D modeling software to create designs, and then generating drawings directly from 3D models. I therefore emphasize the skills needed to interpret drawings, and the decisions that must be made in order to create clear, complete drawings from 3D models.
This text is not a tutorial for SolidWorks or any other CAD program. Although many of the examples shown are created using SolidWorks (the software my students use in class), the concepts are completely generalizable to any modern CAD package.
Organization
Each chapter is intended to be read before class as a first introduction to each topic. Most chapters have interactive “Check your understanding” questions. Students should be learning and practicing the 3D modeling skills necessary to create components from which they can create the types of views and drawings introduced in this text.
Acknowledgments
Large sections of this text are adapted from the Engineering Graphics Active Learning Modules by Dr. Jeremy V. Ernst, Dr. Aaron C. Clank, Dr. Daniel P. Kelly, and Dr. Josh Brown. Originally part of the PUSH Initiative funded by the National Science Foundation, this resource is provided and distributed freely under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-SA) license. I would like to thank the original authors, and I provide this resource under the same license.
