Chapter 3: A Lap around the CAD Track 71

The drawing afd03b-i.dwg [afd03b-m.dwg] contained in the afd03. zip download includes the base plate, column, and one anchor bolt.

Figure 3-9: Bolts and nuts . . . ready to anchor.

If your nut and bolt looks just like Figure 3-9, way to go — you did it right! If, by chance, your bolt is completely inside the circle, you probably missed Step 4 of the “Circling your plate” section, earlier in this chapter, where we tell you to use the CIRCLE command’s Diameter option.

11.Turn off Ortho mode and Object Snap by clicking the Ortho Mode and Object Snap buttons on the status bar until they look dimmed and you see <Ortho off> and <Osnap off> on the command line.

Occasionally, Ortho Mode and object snaps interfere with drafting in AutoCAD. Disabling them (as you do in this step) keeps them from being a problem.

12.Press Ctrl+S to save the drawing.

Not much of a base plate yet, is it? But don’t worry — we cover creating more nuts and bolts with editing commands in the section “Modifying to Make It Merrier,” later in this chapter. If your brain is feeling full, now is a good time to take a break and go look out the window. If you exit AutoCAD, just restart the program and reopen your drawing when you’re ready to continue.

Getting a Closer Look with Zoom and Pan

The example drawing in this chapter is pretty uncluttered and small, but most real CAD drawings are neither of those. Technical drawings are usually jam-packed with lines, text, and dimensions. CAD drawings often get plotted

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72 Part I: AutoCAD 101

on sheets of paper that measure 2 to 3 feet on a side — that’s in the hundreds of millimeters, if you’re a metric maven. Anyone who owns a monitor that large probably can afford to hire a whole room full of drafters (and therefore isn’t reading this book). You need to zoom and pan in your drawings — a

lot. We cover zooming and panning in detail in Chapter 12. Quick definitions should suffice for now:

Zoom means changing the magnification of the display. When you zoom in, you move closer to the drawing objects so you can see detail, and when you zoom out, you move farther away so you can see more of

the drawing area. This does not change the actual size of the objects in the file.

Pan means moving from one area to another without changing the magnification. If you’ve used the scroll bars in any application, you’ve panned the display.

Zooming and panning frequently lets you see the details better, draw more confidently (because you can see what you’re doing), and edit more quickly (because object selection is easier when a zillion objects aren’t on the screen).

Fortunately, zooming and panning in AutoCAD is as simple as it is necessary. The following steps describe how to use AutoCAD’s Zoom and Pan Realtime feature, which is pretty easy to operate and provides a lot of flexibility.

Chapter 12 covers additional zoom and pan options.

To zoom and pan in your drawing, follow these steps:

1.Right-click in a blank area of the drawing and choose Zoom from the shortcut (right-click) menu.

The Realtime option of the ZOOM command starts. The crosshairs change to a magnifying glass, and AutoCAD prompts you at the command line as follows:

Press ESC or ENTER to exit, or right-click to display shortcut menu.

2.Move the crosshairs near the middle of the screen, press and hold the left mouse button, and drag the mouse pointer up and down until the base plate almost fills the screen.

As you can see, dragging up increases the zoom magnification, and dragging down decreases it.

3.Right-click in the drawing area to display the Zoom/Pan Realtime menu (shown in Figure 3-10), and choose Pan from the menu.

The magnifying-glass pointer changes to a hand.

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