DRAW Users Group Past Meeting Highlights

D.R.A.W. Users Group

Dedicated Registered AutoCAD Workers
Users Group - Fort Wayne, IN area

2002 Meeting Highlights

Previous Years Highlights
2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000

December 2002

Our December D.R.A.W. Users Group meeting followed the CAD Associates Duesey Roadshow at the Auburn Cord Duesenburg Musuem in Auburn. Turnout was a bit slimmer than we had hoped, so we covered our AU2002 recap quickly, gave away some cool door prizes and headed out to look at the way cool cars around there. I don't think anyone was able to select a single favorite. We were in awe of the way drawings used to be made. An entire car was drawn on a metal sheet painted white. The paint was then scribed to create the marks. When they were done, the sheet was simply painted over to draw the next model. No revision history there! After the meeting several of us went over to Pizza Hut for pizza and beer treated by Dennis. Thank you Dennis.

The big door prize was an NFR copy of the Inventor series software including AutoCAD 2002, MDT6, and Inventor 5 which was given to Jeff Hess, a Pro-E user needing to be converted. Congratulations Jeff. Two other door prizes were given out for free pizza and beer at a future meeting.

November 2002

This was a great meeting with Larry Goodwin in from Autodesk to do a presentation with Ed Rose of Industrial Technologies on the new Inventor 6 software. We also had our DRAW Logo contest and the winner was Byron Funnell. Thank you voters! And thank you to all who created logos for the contest. We had a number of really cool entries.

October 2002

We held our second meeting at Industrial Technologies classroom off of Wayne Trace. They had a new projections system making the facilities much nicer for the meeting. Our focus of the meeting was PDF's and DWF files. Dave Schoeff did such a great job presenting Adobe Acrobat that two of us got the software and are now using it! Thanks Dave. Byron presented WIN2PDF, which does not have the power of Adobe's product, but can still make simple PDF files to send to customers.

September 2002

Septembers meeting gave us a look at Architectural Desktop and some of its capabilities. We also discussed some basic issues on menus, how to customize them, and the best way to create icons for use with Autodesk products.

August 2002

CAD Associates once again hosted the DRAW meeting allowing us to use their new projector. Dennis did a presentation on Inventor and importing files from other CAD systems.

Ned Scholer did an excellent presentation on the VisualLisp editor and why we might want to use it. He gave simple examples on how to create, check, and debug LISP files. Thanks Ned.

July 2002

Dennis Jeffrey of CAD Associates presented some tips on using layers in AutoCAD 2002. Ed Rose of Industrial Technologies did a lesson on paperspace.

June 2002

June's meeting was another Inventor night with Dave Schoeff continuing his series on Inventor. This hands on lesson allowed users to place parts into an assembly. Byron Funnell did a quick presentation on PartsNow mechanical parts program. We also continued our show and tell and awarded our first big prize of the year to Greg Shearer of PWC Fabrication. Greg won a copy of MDT/Inventor for participating in the show and tell.

May 2002

The May meeting was hosted by CAD Associates with their new overhead projector. Thank you. We had three great segments to this meeting. Ed Rose of Industrial Technologies presented tip and techniques in Paper Space and Model Space including the creation and scaling of viewports, how to manage layers to use with paper space, and dimensioning.

Dave Schoeff then did an excellent job with a hands-on presentation of Inventor. Each of us was able to create an Inventor part and modify it. We look forward to continuing this series.

Ned Scholer of Proficient CAD gave a demonstration of his 2D die detailing software. I wish Autodesk would take note on some of the ways Ned wrote his programs! So nice I was almost wanting to go back to the 2D world. Maybe instead we need to coax Ned more into the 3D world! Thank you very much Ned, it was a super presentation. Ned also showed us several die designs that he had worked on in the past qualifying him for the software giveaway soon.

April 2002

Thank you to our host this month of Industrial Technologies. Our meeting was held in their new classroom at their Wayne Trace facility. We looked at the topics of two new (2002) AutoCAD commands SCALETEXT and JUSTIFYTEXT. Both commands allow some pretty neat modifications to both text and mtext using any of the nine possible justification points.

We then looked at ways to create accelerator keys and aliases. Accelerator keys allow you to assign CTRL-Key, CTRL-SHIFT-Key, Function Key and Numeric Key Pad keys to AutoCAD functions. This is accessed thru the menu customization dialog box and is stored in the current menus MNS file. Aliases are created in the ACAD.PGP file using any text editor. Examples of this are Z for Zoom or L for Line.

Ed Rose then demonstrated some fun things that could be done with VIZ 4. He created and showed some animations done in VIZ. He also showed some solutions to detailing issues from Mechanical Desktop including a demonstration of Power Dimensioning.

March 2002

The meeting was once again well attended and a success even though the overhead projector was out for repair. Ed Rose presented an introduction to Inventor 5.3. We will be looking more at this software in the months to come. Dale Estabrook presented a lesson on groups. It is amazing at the many ways Autodesk has given us to manipulate the drawing database. We finished up with Dave Schoeff showing us how to use Newsgroups using PointA. This is very handy as you can do a search on the full message content instead of just on the headers.

February 2002

Another well attended meeting. Matt Lennon of Rolliegh Inc. gave a demonstration of surfaces in Mechanical Desktop. Matt showed how he might receive an IGES file from a customer and have to "clean" it up, resurface portions of it, test it, and then send it over to a CNC machine to cut a mold or die. Most of us felt blessed that we can stick to 2D or solid models. Thanks for the presentation on surfaces Matt.

Ned Scholer, of ProficientCAD, presented "Using LISP at the command line". It was actually a nice introduction to AutoLISP and how to do basic arithmetic functions within LISP. Ned gave several examples, some hands on training, and lots of tips. Tips included making sure you use at least one real number when the result needs to be a real number and angles are always in radians.

Thanks you again to everyone who helped with this meeting and to all who attended. Special thanks to Dale Estabrook for taking care of the dues and membership lists. It has been awhile since our treasurer has had much to do.

January 2002

What a super meeting! Thanks to all who attended. I wish we could give awards for those who drive over an hour to attend. We had at least 16 persons including three who had never attended before. Very exciting.

Our main speaker this month was Kim Beard from Contech. Kim is Dale Estabrook's daughter, but more importantly, she is the Human Resource Coordinator for Contech. Kim brought a lot of experience and ideas on resume's to the group. For those looking for a job, the message was vital, and for those of us who have solid employment now, it was incentive to keep our resume' up to date. Thank you again Kim for taking time to share with us.

We also held our elections of officers. The result may be seen on our officers page.

We did get through a few more tips from Autodesk University. Tanya Heredia, Dennis Jeffrey, Allen Gager, and Byron Funnell shared some of the information gleaned in Las Vegas in November. Some of the hot tips were on how to utilize the icon on the desktop and its "start in" and "target" for the command line to add information like prototypes, scripts, and profiles.

Thanks again for a super meeting.

Next months meeting schedule