Engineering Drawing
About Engineering Drawing
If you are looking into a career in engineering that focuses on engineering drawing skills, plan to balance your engineering curriculum with courses geared towards technical drawing and graphics. Engineering drawing is more advanced that people might think. Technical drawings do create three-dimensional images of items or buildings, but engineering drawing goes a step beyond.
Engineers work to create solid building or design plans that not only show how to create the specified object, but they also calculate the need for supports when weight loads are involved, tire placement for aircraft and vehicles, the strength of an engine in any transportation device, and other important aspects. With engineering drawing projects, engineers compose these ideals into their engineering drawing. The drawings will contain different perspectives, scale dimensions, materials that are used to create the item, the item or building's finish, and provides a grid of sizes that the item or building cannot exceed. Within any engineering drawing itself, engineers use different types of lines to represent the varying aspects of that item. They will include solid lines for edges, dashed lines for the edges that are not visible from that angle, long dashed lines for the center point of an object, and sometimes cross-hatching is used to demonstrate the different layers of the item in the engineering drawing.
For engineers who get into engineering drawing, they will usually have a CAD program on their computer, drafting table, drafting pens and pencils, rulers, compasses, protractors, scientific calculators, graphing paper, and drafting paper. Most engineers keep these items at home as well for days when they do not feel up to going into the office.
CAD programs are used on computers to come up with computer aided technical drawings of items. CAD programs are used throughout the field of engineering drawing, but many employers require their workers to also know how to create these drawings by hand. One never knows when a computer might need serious repairs.
