Discover how to draft a horizontal wall in AutoCAD, using the midpoint snaps, inner face of lines, and the built-in quick calculator for efficiency. Learn how to offset lines and trim unwanted lines to create a clean, continuous object for a professional drafting look.
Key Insights
- When drafting a horizontal wall in AutoCAD, the midpoint snaps and the inner face of lines can be used to draw the center line of the wall. This prevents extra trimming and makes the drafting process more efficient.
- AutoCAD has a built-in quick calculator which can be used to find distances while in another command. This tool eliminates the need for challenging mathematical equations during the drafting process.
- Trimming unwanted lines and offsetting lines correctly enables the creation of a clean and continuous object. This is beneficial in creating a professional-looking floor plan in AutoCAD.
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The next wall that we want to draw is the long horizontal wall that runs across the middle of the building. Now this wall is at the center line of the building and we can see that because on the left side of our pdf handout it says equal and equal on the dimensions pointing to the center line.
Because of that we know we can use the midpoint snaps here and here to draw the center line of this wall. So let's do that. I will go line.
I'll choose the midpoint here and I'll choose the midpoint here. Enter to say that I am done. You'll notice that I chose the inner face of these two lines instead of the outer line and that is because when I eventually want to trim up and clean up these wall intersections, I don't want to do extra trimming and if this line had crossed over to the outside, I would have to trim more geometry.
It's okay if you drew it that way but just know this will make your drafting more efficient in the future. Zoom extents and control s to save. Now if we check the handout, we can see that this wall is a total width of three and a half inches which is our typical width.
However, we have currently drawn the center line of the wall. We need to go half of that distance above and below. Three and a half over two is not that challenging of a mathematical equation but in some cases you might have a very challenging math problem to find a distance that you need.
AutoCAD has a built-in calculator called the quick calculator to help with just that. You can access the quick calculator by right clicking, quick calc. You can see mine is over here to the side and you can move it by clicking and holding on the dark rectangle here and I'll put it over here.
You can see that we are in basic calculator mode and the number pad options are currently showing. Down at the bottom are some of the more advanced calculator options which we don't need to use for this example. The best part about the quick calculator is we can use it while we are in another command and because we want to offset we can go into the offset command right away.
We can see that it's suggesting to use three and a half inches which we used for our outer rectangles but in this case I want to jump into the quick calculator and find out what our total distance is. So I'll click on the calculator window and I'll enter the text box here. Now we know that one over two is 0.5 in decimal form but sometimes like 3 16ths or 3 32nds of an inch we don't know what a decimal is for a fractional value.
So let's start there. One over two enter and there's our fractions of an inch 0.5 plus three which is our total inch number enter divided by two enter and here we see 1.75 is our final value. The great part about the quick calculator is that at the top you can see this button which is paste value to command line.
By clicking this button it will paste whatever value is here into the command line for us. I'll hit that button paste into command line and we can see 1.75 up here down in our command line. Now I can reactivate the command line by clicking and hitting enter.
It has locked in 1.75 as our offset value. Now we can click the line and go up and click the line and go down enter to say that I'm done. We no longer need the quick calculator so I can close that dialog box but remember it's always one step away right click quick calc.
Let's zoom in at these three lines and how do we make sure that we offset one of the lines to the top and one of the lines to the bottom? Well it's as simple as selecting this outer line. Remember that every line segment including polyline segments have a midpoint grip. When I select this line and this line you will see that the flat rectangle appears which is the polyline grip and that this line here is connected to it.
That means that I did in fact offset one line up and one line down. If you accidentally offset two lines up or two lines down please go back and try this workflow again. I'm going to hit escape escape to cancel and deselect those lines and now I can select this line which is my midpoint line and delete it because it was construction geometry.
Some people prefer to clean up all of their wall joins at the end of a workflow but I like to clean them up as I go. When I'm drawing walls in AutoCAD they are cut with an imaginary line and we like to fill them with pochet. That's a hatch pattern that represents a filled geometry.
Because of this the wall cut is mainly symbolic and we don't like to show the difference between one wall connecting to another wall. In a framing plan or some other drawing types this is a distinction but for this example in this floor plan we want to make the walls look like one continuous object. We want to trim out these lines.
I'll go up to trim and I'll pick on this line right here. Now the walls appear to be connected. With the trim command active I'll pan over clicking and holding on my middle mouse wheel and zoom in here and trim this line out as well.
Enter to say that I'm done. Zoom extends CTRL S to save. In the next video we'll finish our interior walls.
See you there!
