Engineered Design Solutions

CADTutor

CADTutor. forums is by far the best resource on the internet to get your AutoCAD questions answered.

Steve Johnson's

Steve Johnson is known for his AutoCAD bug watch.

Ellen Finkelstein.com

Ellen has a plethora of AutoCAD tips and tutorials. She seems to have a weird fascination for breaking lines.

Robin Capper's blog

Robin always has something interesting to read, whether AutoCAD related or not.

Mark Kiker's blog

Mark's covers many aspects of Cad management at his CADDManager Blog.

Melanie Perry's blog

Melanie is all about AutoCAD (those are her words) but she doesn't let that stop her from other topics. In her spare time Melanie conducts the Augi Annual Salary Survey

R.K. McSwain's blog

R.K McSwain has some very nice tutorials on his blog.

AutoCAD Tips

Welcome! You have likely arrived here looking for ways to improve your AutoCAD performance or perhaps increase your AutoCAD knowledge and skills. I hope I can add to your current skill set or somehow contribute to increasing your productivity. I continue to use AutoCAD 14 to do my machine design and detail work so If you would like up to date information regarding the latest AutoCAD releases, you may be interested in visiting some of my favorite blogs and web sites that I have linked to on the left.

I hope you don't mind a gentle plug for my software "CadTempo". While developing the methods and procedures I use in my daily activities, one of the first AutoLISP programs I wrote was a time logger. My reasoning was, if I could determine the work that required the most amount of time, my customization efforts would be best spent addressing those items. Additionally, I would be able to determine if my efforts were of value, and just how much value. As the saying goes Time Is Money, and I wanted to know where my money was!

I have since created a commercial product and made it available to the CAD community. Please visit the CadTempo web site to see how it may fit your needs. Download a free 30 day trial and take some measurements of your current drawing practices. Then, as you implement changes to your CAD modeling and drafting routines you can easily determine the successful (and perhaps not so successful) changes.

CadTempo is an automatic time tracking utility for CAD.
Download the free 30 day trial of CadTempo now.

AutoCAD Tips:

Convert a 3d perspective view into a 2d dwg

After creating the perspective view of your 3d model plot to a DBX file. Open a new drawing and use the DBXIN command. The downside of this technique is the new drawing is composed of short line segments.

Some 3d drawing tips:

AutoCAD will always construct geometry on the current x,y plane when entering 2 dimensional coordinates at the command line.

Always have your UCS icon on.

Always examine your UCS Icon before constructing objects.
Manipulation of the UCS is key to success in 3D modeling.

If you are in a busy drawing it may be difficult to even see your UCS Icon if it is set to follow (where the location of the icon follows the origin you place it at). I personally have this turned off so my Icon is always in the lower left corner.

Always create geometry using Osnaps and point filters. Guessing at a point location is not allowed.

Set your UCS back to world before exiting the drawing. You'll come to appreciate this when inserting models into other drawings.