Mechanical Drafting and Design

Cranksaft design

Mechanical drafting is a means by which mechanical design engineers design product and create instructions for manufacturing parts. A mechanical drafting can be a model of a computer or hand-drawn schematic showing all dimensions necessary to manufacture parts, and assembly records, list of materials needed, and other related information. An American mechanical design engineer or skilled worker who creates technical drawings may be cited as the drafter or draftsman. Historically the process of drafting the two-dimensional, but the computer-aided design (CAD) program now allows designers to create in three dimensions.

mechanical drafting and design

Instructions for the manufacture must be fed into the machine as needed, either manually, through programmed instruction, or through the use of computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) or combined computer-aided design CAD / CAM programs. Optionally, an engineer can also manually manufacture parts using mechanical drafting, but this is a rare increase, with the advent of the computer manufactures numerically controlled (CNC). Engineers primarily manually manufacture of components in the field of applied spray coatings, finishes, and other processes that can not be economically or practically performed by a machine.

The preparation is used in almost every profession of mechanical engineering, and by other branches of engineering and architecture. Three-dimensional models created using CAD software is also often used in finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).