CAD - Introductory

Course details

This introductory course in CAD is for people who need to have some knowledge of CAD programs but are not sure if they need to do a more comprehensive CAD course at the moment. It is ideal for people who need to be able to prepare simple CAD drawings for use in their own organisation or for sending out to customers. It will also help beginners to read and understand CAD drawings properly.

Basic CAD skills include:

• Navigation and Basic Tools
• Creating Basic Drawings
• Creating Basic Objects
• Working with Units
• Manipulating Objects
• Changing Object Angles
• Preparing Drawings for Printing
• Printing Drawings

Course Aims

It is important to be able to read and understand CAD drawings and to be able to do minor changes and edits to them. In helping to communicate clearly what we need in a technical design we must be able to prepare basic CAD drawings which contain the important elements and places them in the correct positions.

This course takes participants from the very beginning and imparts enough knowledge and skill to help remove the mysteries of CAD.

Course Syllabus

• Navigation and Basic Tools
• Toolbox - overview
• Navigation - basic skills
• Working with files and displaying objects

Creating Basic Drawings

• Using basic drawing tools
• Inputting data
• Viewing, zoom and pan

Creating Basic Objects

• Selecting objects
• Using existing objects to create new ones
• Changing the position of an object
• Snaps - object and polar (and polar tracking)
• Object patterns
• Resizing objects
• Object mirror images

Working With Units

• Unit preferences
• Scales and unit control
• Reading dimensions from a PDF
• Linear and angular units
• Unit precision

Manipulating Objects

• Move, copy and rotate
• Offset and erase
• Scale, stretch, extend and trim
• Changing Object Angles
• Arrays
• Roration
• Exploding

Preparing Drawings for Printing/Plotting

• Paper space and paper space limits
• View points
• Plot files - overview
• Printing/ Plotting Drawings
• Plot configuration
• PDFs - overview
• Preparing PDF for emailing