AutoCad 2007

[Robin Hewitt]

You usually start with a drawing on the back of an envelope, it has dimensions. Construction lines are your friend to set a base point. A construction line goes on forever so you can zoom out and select the lot with two right to left selection boxes then press the Delete key to make them all go away.

Put in two construction lines, one vertical, one horizontal and you have a basepoint. If they draw at whacky angles press F8 to turn ortho on and constrain them.

COPY the construction lines to the measurements on the envelope and you have reference points where they intersect. I usually do my construction lines in deep blue so I can recognise them for what they are.

To get the slots evenly spaced around the circle I'd draw one centered on the circle, move it left, move it up. Then use the MIRROR command twice, CENTERed on the circle, to turn one in to four.

When locating stuff I tend to draw lots of unnecessary lines and circles then delete then after they have served their purpose. If you want a line to start from the middle of something, type LINE MID then hover the mouse over it, easy to start the line at half the SNAP grid dong that but you can figure it out.

Edit: Forgot to mention END gets you exactly on the end of something. PERP will take you to a perpendicular on the object you select. If you press the spacebar when it asks you for a startpoint it locates you to the end of the last item you drew.

Type in a command and the command box at the bottom of the screen tells you what AutoCAD wants and gives you options. The command box dates from when AutoCAD used two screens, one for the graphics, one for the text. It is so useful it never went away.

If you play with it you will soon get the idea.

Incidentally it doesn't care whether you use upper or lower case. The spacebar is the same as the Enter key unless you are inserting a block.