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engineering w/o drawings?

design-engine

New member
I have a good question to pose to the forum...



First there has been a big push with the new ansi standards for 3d notes.





Do you think we can get away without drawings in 10 years?
 
There are a few big companies that are already doing this, or very close. Certain division of Raytheon and Northrop grumman are there, and they are the big pushers for getting PTC to be meeting the ASME y14.41 standard.
 
I worked at Boeing, Wichita back in '91/'92 doing small tool design ON THE BOARD. The Catia guys just could not keep up, tee hee. Anyway, they were touting the 777 as being the "paperless airplain". They were drowning in a sea of paper! While I doubt that we will ever see a "paperless" product, there is less need for "complete" drawings. When a machine shop is fully intigrated with Pro/E one only need put critical dimensions on a drawing. It is possible to have a computer screen at the machine tool, thereby reducing the need for a hard copy. However, while I am probably "old school", note my proper grammer, punctuation, and capitlization, I find it much easier to scrible on a piece of paper to do concepting and to see what a change will look like.


That said, I never say never.
 
I have been working with cad for at least 25 years in both Commercial and Government Defense they have talked about this for at least that long (remember the saying goingpaperless). I work with various Vendors dealing with theRail Road Industryand I can tell you that the first thing they ask for is a drawing. I think that Pro-e is on the right track with 3D dimensioning but I think it needs a lot of improvement.<?:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:eek:ffice:eek:ffice" />


Just my Opinion
 
Hi all-

Heres the thing I have noticed. I am going to look at this from a different angle. Some machinery designers/manufacturers I have worked with don't produce any engineering drawings at all. Instead, they go straight to their in-house CNC and create the part (most use NX). This is not new. However, what is interesting is the lack of consideration of how to design a good and economical part which was big in all of the companies that I have ever worked at in the past.

Don't get me wrong I think that CNC is great. The problem, however, in my experience lies in the fact that usually inexperienced engineers look at CNC and see it as a means to throw all the "old" principals of part creation out the window. In fact, our company, in the past, has purchased the designs from these companies (they were contracted by us) that only gave us the models. However, we don't have CNC capabilities and have had some bad experiences in the past with outside CNC vendors. These parts are too complex (trust me, ALOT of fancy engineering features) to be incorporated into any readable engineering paper drawing.

I don't know if anybody else has run into this problem with the so-called push towards the paper-less system. I see the paper-less system is a bad thing (expect maybe for complex designs such as airplanes).

That's my two sense at least.

Thanks.

-Adam J. Cook
 
Guess you need a drawing to get tolerances and functional information across. Unless you work purely in-house, but even then it's better to inform than to "expect".


That been said, I've done projects with a minimum of drawing. Designed a complex plastic part that was transferred as 3D-model to the toolmaker, after verification of the translation mode. Also did an elaborate sheetmetal job where the shop only got flattened DXF and principal drawings of the bent result. So it certainly is possible. And when you start freeform modeling there's even no way that you can accurately describe in a drawing what the result should be. Look at ship-builders. The best they could do was give sections at specified locations, the rest was up to the shop.


Even in drawings I try to minimize real paper. Information goes out as PDF mostly these days.


Alex
 

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