Engineering Graphics - Demystified - Part 2 - Applications

What are the steps in creating an engineering drawing?

In engineering graphics questions related to lines and solids will be like follows

1. A line is at a distance of x cm from the horizontal plane and y cm from the vertical plane. It is tilted by some angle from the horizontal and vertical plane.

2. A solid (cylinder, prism etc) is at certain specific distance from both the planes and it is tilted by a certain angle.

Once you see such a question you shoule be able to think in the following lines,

• close your eyes
• think about the shape
• Think about a horizontal and vertical wall
• Now think about placing the object parallel to both the walls.
• Now imagine tilting the object in one direction (tilting from the vertical wall)
• Now you see a 3 dimensional view of the object in your mind, which is tilted in one direction
• Now imagine tilting this object in the other direction also.
• Now visualize as if you are seeing the object from the front. If possible draw a free hand drawing of what you visualized in a rough paper
• Now visualize as if you are seeeing the object from the top. Draw a free hand drawing of the top view.
• Open your eyes, follow the procedures given in the text book or as taught by your instructor and Draw the pic.
• During each step just think about the things you imagined earlier.
• Finally when you get the final top view and front view, cross check it with the rough drawing.
• if there is an error againg try to visualize the whole thing. .

If you learn like this, then engineering graphics will achieve its intended objective.

Where will you be applying engineering graphics in real world situations?

Once you are in a job as an engineer, all the basic tools and fundamental understanding for solving the real world problems are expected to be available in you.

Engineering graphics is one such tool which will aid to solve some of the problems in hand. for a mechanical engineer, civil engineer, production engineer, architect etc there is no question about where it will be used.

For students of other branches it may come handy in the following situations.

There will be situations in your job, where you have

• to visualise a housing for the electronic ciruit module which you designed,
• to design a electronic circuit board for a prescribed housing, the housing diagram will be given to you as an engineering drawing,
• For a system analyst, it will aid in drawing real world objects while creating a system drawing with real world objects (concept of perspective projection is useful here). A system drawing with real world objects will help to convey the problem solution to the user very clearly.

An excellent tutorial for learning engineering graphics, especially orthographic Projection is here

http://www.ul.ie/~rynnet/orthographic_projection_fyp/webpages/what_is_ortho.html