Tutorial for Creating a Symbol.

This tutorial will guide you through the process of creating a 2D symbol for use in DesignCad.

The symbol being created is a Socket Head Cap Screw M20x70. I will now refer to this as a ‘cap screw’.

When first starting a new drawing DesignCad, using the hot key ‘Q’, select ‘layer’. Highlight layer ‘0’ and assign a colour. (Assign this colour to all new symbols that you are going to create. This will become evident in a future tutorial, ‘The Use of Standards in Cad Design’.) I have selected ‘Purple’ for this exercise. Leave ‘Grid’ and ‘Snap to Grid’ turned off. Get used to not having them turned on.

Once we have created and set the above, select ‘Apply’, ‘OK’ to close window.

We now set our units: ‘Dimension’, ‘Units’, hot key ‘U’. Set units to ‘200’ click ‘OK’ to close this window.

Now, create an origin. The origin will also be our ‘handle’ for future placement of the symbol within new drawings. I have placed the origin about 1/3 in from the left hand side of the screen. Some of you will also have noticed that there are no ‘rulers’ turned on. I do not have them turned on for one very important reason: screen real estate is very valuable – even with a 22" screen. I also do not have the grid on. Learn to NOT use it.

Draw some centre lines that pass through the origin, allow plenty of line passing past the origin. Change the line style to centre, but keep it on the same layer, layer ‘0’

Our next step in this process is to convert our pencil drawing, as shown, into a cad drawing. As can be seen, we have sketched the basic dimensions and outline for our cap screw.

Using the following co-ordinates, we will start to develop our cap screw:

The head with the hex:

A circle at 0,0

Draw another circle at 0,0 ending at 8.5,0

Draw a hex, starting at 0,0 ending at 8.5,0. Delete the inner circle.

The head:

50,0; 50,15; 70,15; 70,10

The next set of co-ordinates creates the shank:

20,10; 90,10; 90,0

Where the thread ends:

40,10; 40,0

To represent the thread:

128,10; 128,0

then,

130,8; 90,8

Now we need to chamfer the thread at the end of the shank. This is a 2x45°

This now has one half of our capscrew. Next is to mirror the elevation of the cap screw body.

From the dimensions we have in the sketch we should now have the following:

I simply now draw a rectangle around what we have drawn and trim back the line work so that the centre lines are not too long – makes it look neat and tidy!

Set drawing handle to the intersection of the cap screw head and shank. At this point, this is where the cap screw head will come up against the material being clamped.

Our next step is to save the symbol. On my pc, I have a partitioned hard drive and so I save all my symbols to the partitioned drive. Save as AHCS_M20x70.

There you have it, your first symbol! Easy? No problems. Now when we bring this symbol into any new drawing, it will come in at the scale you are creating your new drawing at.

This tutorial has been created by Steve Maynard-Smith of Christchurch, New Zealand.

Steve is a Manufacturing Engineering Technician for Dynamic Controls, where he uses SolidWorks on a daily basis. He has been using DesignCad privately since version 7 2D in 1996. His present DesignCad package is DesignCad Version 14.

Steve has designed and built many machines, some of which include a vacuum forming machine with a sheet size of 2m x 3m forming 6mm polycarbonate, ultrasonic welders, die tools and a milk tanker wash system to name just some.

Steve can be reached at: