An engineering drawing, a type of technical drawing, is used to fully and clearly define requirements for engineered items.Engineering drawing (the activity) produces engineering drawings (the documents). More than just the drawing of pictures, it is also a language—a graphical language that communicates ideas and information from one mind to another.[1] Most especially, it communicates all needed information from the engineer who designed a part to the workers who will make it.
Overview[edit]Relationship to artistic drawingEngineering drawing and artistic drawing are both types of drawing, and either may be called simply "drawing" when the context is implicit. Engineering drawing shares some traits with artistic drawing in that both create pictures. But whereas the purpose of artistic drawing is to convey emotion or artistic sensitivity in some way (subjective impressions), the purpose of engineering drawing is to convey information (objective facts).[1] One of the corollaries that follows from this fact is that, whereas anyone can appreciate artistic drawing (even if each viewer has his own unique appreciation), engineering drawing requires some training to understand (like any language); but there is also objective commonality in the interpretation (also like other languages).[1] Engineering drawing uses an extensive set of conventions to convey information very precisely, with very little ambiguity.[edit]Relationship to other technical drawing typesThe process of producing engineering drawings, and the skill of producing them, is often referred to as technical drawing or drafting, although technical drawings are also required for disciplines that would not ordinarily be thought of as parts of engineering (such as architecture, landscaping, cabinet making, and garment-making).[edit]Cascading of conventions by specialtyThe various fields share many common conventions of drawing, while also having some field-specific conventions. For example, even within metalworking, there are some process-specific conventions to be learned—casting, machining, fabricating, and assembly all have some special drawing conventions, and within fabrication there is further division, including welding, riveting, pipefitting, and erecting. Each of these trades has some details that only specialists will have memorized.[edit]Legal instrumentsAn engineering drawing is a legal document (that is, a legal instrument), because it communicates all the needed information about "what is wanted" to the people who will expend resources turning the idea into a reality. It is thus a part of a contract; the purchase order and the drawing together, as well as any ancillary documents (engineering change orders [ECOs], called-out specs), constitute the contract. Thus, if the resulting product is wrong, the worker or manufacturer are protected from liability as long as they have faithfully executed the instructions conveyed by the drawing. If those instructions were wrong, it is the fault of the engineer. Because manufacturing and construction are typically very expensive processes (involving large amounts of capital and payroll), the question of liability for errors has great legal implications as each party tries to blame the other and assign the wasted cost to the other's responsibility. This is the biggest reason why the conventions of engineering drawing have evolved over the decades toward a very precise, unambiguous state.[edit]Standardization and disambiguationIn service of the goal of unambiguous communication (mentioned above), engineering drawings made professionally today are expected to follow certain well-known and widely followed standards, such as ASME Y14.5 and Y14.5M (most recently revised in 2009) or a group of ISO standards that are quite similar. This standardization also aids with internationalization, because people from different countries who speak different languages can share the common language of engineering drawing, and can communicate with each other quite well, at least as concerns the technical details of an object.[edit]MediaFor centuries, until the post-World War II era, all engineering drawing was done manually by using pencil and pen on paper or other substrate (e.g., vellum, mylar). Since the advent of computer-aided design (CAD), engineering drawing has been done more and more in the electronic medium with each passing decade. Today most engineering drawing is done with CAD, but pencil and paper have not disappeared.Some of the tools of manual drafting include pencils, pens and their ink, straightedges, T-squares, French curves, triangles, rulers, scales, and erasers.Producing drawings usually involves creating an original that is then reproduced, generating multiple copies to be distributed to the shop floor, vendors, company archives, and so on. The classic reproduction methods involved blue and white appearances (whether white-on-blue or blue-on-white), which is why engineering drawings were long called, and even today are still often called, "blueprints" or "bluelines", even though those terms are anachronistic from a literal perspective, since most copies of engineering drawings today are made by more modern methods (often inkjet or laser printing) that yield black or multicolour lines on white paper. The more generic term "print" is now in common usage in the U.S. to mean any paper copy of an engineering drawing. In the case of CAD drawings, the original is the CAD file, and the printouts of that file are the "prints".[edit]Relationship to model-based definition (MBD/DPD)For centuries, engineering drawing was the sole method of transferring information from design into manufacture. In recent decades another method has arisen, called model-based definition (MBD) or digital product definition (DPD). In MBD, the information captured by the CAD software app is fed automatically into a CAM app (computer-aided manufacturing), and is translated via postprocessor into other languages such as G-code, which is executed by a CNC machine tool (computer numerical control). Thus today it is often the case that the information travels from the mind of the designer into the manufactured component without having ever been codified by an engineering drawing. In MBD, the dataset, not a drawing, is the legal instrument. The term "technical data package" (TDP) is now used to refer to the complete package of information (in one medium or another) that communicates information from design to production (such as 3D-model datasets, engineering drawings, engineering change orders (ECOs), spec revisions and addenda, and so on). However, even in the MBD era, where theoretically production could happen without any drawings or humans at all, it is still the case that drawings and humans are involved. It still takes CAD/CAM programmers, CNC setup workers, and CNC operators to do manufacturing, as well as other people such as quality assurance staff (inspectors) and logistics staff (for materials handling, shipping-and-receiving, and front office functions). These workers often use drawings in the course of their work that have been produced by rendering and plotting (printing) from the MBD dataset. When proper procedures are being followed, a clear chain of precedence is always documented, such that when a person looks at a drawing, s/he is told by a note thereon that this drawing is not the governing instrument (because the MBD dataset is). In these cases, the drawing is still a useful document, although legally it is classified as "for reference only", meaning that if any controversies or discrepancies arise, it is the MBD dataset, not the drawing, that governs.[edit]Systems of dimensioning and tolerancingAlmost all engineering drawings (except perhaps reference-only views or initial sketches) communicate geometry (shape and location), dimensions, and tolerances for those characteristics. Several systems of dimensioning and tolerancing have evolved. The simplest dimensioning system just specifies distances between points (such as an object's length or width, or hole center locations). Since the advent of well-developed interchangeable manufacture, these distances have been accompanied by plus-or-minus or min-and-max-limits tolerances. Coordinate dimensioning involves defining all points, lines, planes, and profiles in terms of Cartesian coordinates, with a common origin. Coordinate dimensioning was the sole best option until the post-World War II era saw the development of geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), which departs from the limitations of coordinate dimensioning (e.g., rectangular-only tolerance zones, tolerance stacking) to allow the most logical tolerancing of both geometry and dimensions (that is, both form [shapes/locations] and sizes).
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