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:

Manufactured Parts
• 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

2. Extended Draw Toolbar 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
• Nearly automatic centerline creation and updating
• Specialty 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 and 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 echanical 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. Support for International Drafting Standards

Multiply your productivity with tools that help you and your team deliver consistent, standards-based esign 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, color, 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 Inventor parts and assemblies. Incorporate design revisions quickly and easily through the associative link—the software will automatically notify you of changes to the Inventor file and regenerate the 2D drawing, including any changes. AutoCAD Mechanical also includes the industry-standard IGES.