AutoCAD

Auto CAD started off slowly as it took me some getting use to drawing with a mouse on a computer screen. the first task was to draw a house, a simple sqaure house which seamed to look easy, it was hard for only the first few minutes which i was quite suprized at as i tought it was gong to be much much harder and frustrating. after the first few minutes i gained enough koledge to comfortably start working away. so what im trying to say is once you got the hang of it, it was no longer a challenge.

this AUTOCAD was differant to our other class learning experiance as we had to take down our own notes which was fine.

after we designed this house, we were then set the challenge of drawing up a snubbing knob which is the peice on the front of your trailer which your boats bow fits into when being whinched out onto the trailer that stops the boat in its final wind up. this was much more of a challenge as angles and cuircles were involved more and to a difficulter degree. this tested att of our new skills which mainly consised of setting up the page for working on.

i had a bit of a mess about on the AUTOCAD and tried designing soem power boats, i gave it a good crack espesily on an eight meter design with many curves which actully turned out to be a little beauty.

then was the task of drawing out the arn which secures the shaftdrive to the bottom of the hull. this was easy as it eas mostly straight lines with basic curves which was done within minutes.

Day 2 turned out to be much more of a challenge.

we were all given the task of drawing up our oilstone boxs which we had already built. this was good to draw something which we already new about and had experiance dealing with. the oilstone box was easy enough to draw as most of the dimentions were already given to us. the harder parts were the bits were the dimentions were not given as you needed to find the scale of the drawing which was in the tital block and useing a scale rule, measureing out the disatance and changing it acordingly. the newest and challenging part for me was the dotted outline of the stone which was hidden. having to draw a dotted line was meanign i had to go up to the task bar and Turn on the little light next to the dotted line and select the write layer...trust me this took a lot longer to do than it sounds.

The Toolbox was given out as the next task to draw. the toolbox was very simplisticc to draw as most lines were straight and all meet up acordingly. the hard part came when the curve at the top od the back had to be completed. this was dificult due to the amount of practice I have ad at it. first you need to outline a cricle around the sharp point to isolate the little 'V' shape at the end to tell where the lines would keep going if they did. then all that remained was to bring back and shorten the lines up a bit and then put a radius of 20 on it. this was simple as you just click the radius button, type in R 'ENTER' then '20' then select the desired lines and it creates the arc at the right radius. then get rid of that curcle remailing by selecting it the pressing the 'DLE' button which got rid of it. the real hard task was to come. it was time to draw the tool box in isometric. watching the teacher draw a demo on the 'SMARTBOARD' was very confusng and hard to take all in. but once I got under way with it, it wasnt so bad. the hardest part was getting that curve on the back, just like the 2D toolbox. but with the isometric view you needed to create a box and get the mddle point by putting a line through it. then pressing 'EL' 'ENTER' 'L' 'ENTER' on the key board and then calso type '20' twice which made the 40 by 40 square fill up right to the edgeswhich was perfict. then highligt the hole box and circle and click 'M' 'ENTER' and the clicked on the little green shap which comes up and then drag it over the the desired point, the desired point id the top point of the box lining up with the top line on the sqare and then moved over to the left so the other side of the circle was touching also, the copy the sqaure and circle with the copy buttion on the right and copy it over to the nex side. then once its all lined up and you are happy, remove the egisiting lines awy by by using the trim buttion---which i dint undersatnd and it didnt work for me so  jst used the break button which works by selecting two points and then it gets rid on the parts in the middle. this was was quite time consuming which im sure i will try learn a better way tomorro. once the hard part was done most of the box designing involved coping lines and basic line drawings.

we also printed this off and learnd that you cannot always see you mistakes on the computor, like numbers too small, lines not matching and other angled shapes....real jokers stuff.

also itook down many notes which consisted of setting up the printer, new short cuts isometirc work and setting circles up:

today on day three of AutoCAD we were given a drawing with the measurements done incorrectly. it was up to us to re-draw and re-measure this drawing. the drawing was in a 1:1 scake on the origonal paper so all that was needed to be done was use the scale rule which gave me all the crooect measurements needeed to complete the drawing. the drawing was a 1:1 scale of a 'Pindle and Gudgeon' which is used on the rudder and the stern of a sail yacht which is used to pivot the rudder on the center pont of the stern.

 

the next item which needed to be drawn was a rudder...

the rudder consisted of curves and angles which didnt seam to be a problem for me at first, at frist I just used the normal curved method and when t came do re-measuring and checking my creation, it was wrong. the real way to create those curves consisted of drawing many curcles and lineing tem up with already constructed shapes which when you had a grasp on it, it was alot easier, but in the starting prosess it was hard and mistakes were made frequently. the rest of the drawing was quite basic and simple as once you know how to do something, you can apply it in many areas, such as coping boxs and reflecting shapes.

After this rudder we had to put our boay plan on to AutoCAD. this boady plan was from our 7.3M yacht desigh which we had draw out onto paper. this was easy as yu just create a gridd like on the paper from the table of offsetts provied and away you we,nt , just like int he drawing and even lofting. there is a special tool you can use to create the curves on the table of offset points called a spline, this spline was quite useful but also quit confusing if you put a point wrong somewere or on another point.

another challenge which was given was we were all given a table of offsets for a round bilge boat, to go on one side of the drawing and a hard chined boat to go onto the other. then we were told to create a frame around the topsides and hull to make it seam like we were going to build the hull and then had to trim all the extra lines away to crate the frame with all of the cross spaulls, gussits, legs and other things.




body plan, frame of 7.3