Develop shaft components

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Let's see how we can create a shaft in AutoCAD Mechanical by focusing on the segments of the shaft,

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rather than the line work you might use in conventional AutoCAD.

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Then we'll automatically generate a side view of that shaft without having to do any drawing ourselves.

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Then we'll conceal and convert any lines without the need to trim or change any line types or layers.

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Before doing anything, we'll go ahead and create a new component for the input shaft.

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We'll also define what sort of view that we want to create entities in.

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In this case, we'll say that we want to create a front view.

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And we'll tell it where we want it located in the drawing.

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Now, this is just a reference or similar to an insertion point.

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The next step though is the important one. We activate that view.

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This will dim out all of the other characters.

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And now you can begin going through the process of creating any lines, arcs or typical geometry that you want.

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For our purposes though, we'll take advantage of some of the AutoCAD Mechanical tools,

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and we'll use the tools on the Content tab, which there are many of, there's libraries, screw connections,

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standard holes, specialized holes, lots of machine components and even standard metal components.

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Starting the shaft generator, what we'll do is establish where the center line of the shaft will be.

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Then we'll use the shaft generator dialog to start placing the segments of the shaft based on their length and diameter.

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Constructing a shaft this way is much faster than using the typical rectangles or offsets.

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And we can even get into more specialized tools.

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For example, we can add sloped portions to the shaft very easily.

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We can build in standard geometry like wrench flats or threads.

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In this case, we want to place a geared segment onto the shaft to align with another gear that's already in the drawing.

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Selecting the tool, you'll have the opportunity to put in the key information on how the shaft will be built,

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and it will go ahead and generate that segment.

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Then you can finish out your shaft design as you need.

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You can rough it in and always come back and edit it later.

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Adding a threaded end to the shaft, You'll see that there's a large selection of standard threads.

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You can easily go back and edit any segment with a simple double click rather than having to use a separate tool.

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It brings you right back to the same dialog that you used to create it.

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This is much easier than having to remember two sets of tools to create everything.

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With this finished, we can tell it that we want to place a right end view in the drawing,

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and we'll go ahead and generate the complete right end view.

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With a simple double click on the shaft, you can bring up the editing dialog box again.

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And if you make a change to the shaft, you'll have the option of updating any side or sectional view as well.

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With the shaft complete, we can double click on the top level of the browser and reactivate the entire drawing.

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Then we can use the height situation tool to tell the drawing that the shaft is in front of several objects.

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We can choose whether to have them hidden or have them removed from the drawing altogether.

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AutoCAD Mechanical doesn't break those objects.

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It simply obscures them from our view and we'll keep them up to date if we change the size of the shaft.