Uncover the tricks and tools of creating technical drawings in AutoCAD, focusing on creating detail symbols. This article guides you through the process of drawing circles and using the 'specify' command, ensuring accuracy and efficiency in your AutoCAD usage.
Key Insights
- The 'specify' command in AutoCAD implies either clicking or typing a value. This is particularly useful when creating technical drawings that require precise inputs.
- When drawing circles, the Center Radius circle tool allows you to input the specific center point of your circle. AutoCAD also offers the flexibility to switch between specifying the radius or the diameter of the circle, ensuring accurate dimensions.
- Using view options like 'zoom extents' can aid in filling the screen with the drawn geometry, providing a clearer view of your work. Remember to frequently save your work, which can be done quickly in AutoCAD using the Control + S keyboard shortcut.
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In this video, we will continue drawing the detail symbol. As a reminder, we are going to draw only the circle and the horizontal line for the detail symbol.
Please reference your PDF handout as we walk through this video. In order to draw the circle for my detail symbol, I'm going to go to the Home tab, Draw Panel, and I will find the Circle button. And I want to make sure that this says Center Radius, and it does.
If you're showing a different option, the button might be under this fly out dropdown. Here, you'll see all of the circle options with the descriptive text. I'm going to choose Center Radius, and I'll move my cursor into the drawing area.
Now, if we review the command prompt, we can see that it is asking us to do something. It reads, specify center point for circle, or, and then it provides some options in brackets. We do not need to change the options for now.
Instead, I want to focus on the word specify. When you see specify in a command in AutoCAD, that means either click or type. Specify is click or type.
I know I repeated that, but it's very important to understand that when you see specify, you can either click something on the screen or type in a value. In this case, just to try it out, I'll click on the screen, and I can see that I have successfully placed my center point for my circle. Now, when I move my cursor, I can see the circle getting bigger and smaller.
I can click again to set the size of my circle. Now, this is excellent. We've successfully drawn a circle.
However, I do not know exactly where the center point of that circle is or the size of that circle. And those are two bad things, especially when creating technical drawings in AutoCAD. In this case, if we check the handout, our center point is going to be at zero comma zero, and we have a half inch diameter value.
I'm gonna go up to the undo button, and I'll reactivate my center radius circle. Now, instead of clicking, let's type to specify the center point. In this case, I'm going to type zero comma zero.
I do not need to type a third zero because we are in 2D space. So I'll hit ENTER, and I can see that when I move my cursor, my circle is beginning to be drawn in the bottom left corner of my screen. Now, I have a diameter value on my handout, and this is where the options in the command prompt come into play.
We are drawing using the center radius circle, which means that right now the command prompt reads, specify radius of circle. If I typed in half inch right now, it would be a wrong size. Instead, I want to make AutoCAD ask me for a diameter, and I can see in my options, I can switch to a diameter.
I can come down and click the word diameter to activate this option, or you'll notice that the D is a different color in the word. I can type D, enter, to lock in diameter as my option. Now, the command prompt reads, specify diameter of circle, and I will type one over two for half an inch, and hit ENTER.
We can just barely see the circle in the bottom left of our screen. In order to fill the screen with the circle, I'm going to go to my view options, zoom, zoom extents. Zoom extents fills the screen with all geometry that you have drawn.
Now, in order to double check to make sure that I have the right size for this circle, I will select the circle and go modify properties. This will open our properties window, and the properties window allows us to see geometry data and update it. Over here, I can see that the circle is drawn at 0, 0, 0, which is where we wanted it.
The radius is a quarter inch, and the diameter is a half inch, and these are in direct proportion to one another. As a reminder, you can update this information in the properties window at any time, just in case you've drawn it in the incorrect position or at the incorrect scale. For practice, I'm going to undo the circle, and I'm going to draw it one more time.
Circle, I see specify, I think click or type, 0, 0, 0, enter, D on the keyboard, and hit ENTER for diameter option, and my diameter distance will be one over two, or I could type 0.5, which represents half an inch. I'll hit ENTER on the keyboard, and I will go view, zoom extents. I'm going to hit control and S on my keyboard to save the file.
The control S keyboard shortcut is very important when working in AutoCAD. It is a very common keyboard shortcut. You could also save by going file, save, and here you can see the control S keyboard shortcut.
