Development of the New Drafting and Computer Aided Design Standards for Mechanical Engineering Program

Abstract

The paper provides the method to develop the drafting and CAD standards for mechanical engineering program based on the systemic approach. The drafting has been used since the early stage of engineering. Lots of drafting technique has been developed and standardized. Recently, Computer Aided Design (CAD) software has been used widely in academia and industries too. Because of these reasons, every mechanical engineering program offers Drafting and CAD courses to its students. Some programs even have their own Drafting and CAD standards. However, it is not easy to develop the Drafting and CAD standard for whole program. It needs a careful plan to develop the standards. It needs to meet the certain requirements. Those requirements are 1) It needs to meet ASME Y14/ANSI Y14 standard as much as possible, 2) Students should be able to understand the standards and apply the rules to their own drawing and CAD models, 3) Any instructors should be able to give the proper feedback to students about their drawing using the standards, 4) Graduating students should be able to adopt the standard of their company easily. To meet these requirements, some preliminary work must be done. 1) Understanding of ASME Y14 is needed, 2) Expertise of one or more CAD software packages is required, 3) Students’ level of understanding the ASME Y14 standards needs to be measured, 4) Feedback from industries is required. Each steps of development of Drafting and CAD standards are explained using real example of students work.