Engineering & CAD drafting insights.
The ASTCAD Engineering Design and Drafting Blog — practical tutorials, software guides, Australian standards walkthroughs and engineering case studies from our team. Over 200 articles covering CAD drafting, BIM, FEA, mechanical design and structural detailing.
Editor’s pick this week.
AS 4100 Base Plate Design: The Limit State Procedure, Step by Step
The four limit state checks a column base plate has to pass under AS 4100 and AS 3600 — bearing, plate bending, anchorage and weld — and what the shop drawing must state.
Read articleLatest from the blog.
Solidworks Cad Data management
It is no secret that managing Gigabytes of CAD data can be tough. Especially if you’re a new comer to a company that contains years of ...
Opt for affordable 2D drafting services
We are one of the best Australian Design & Drafting service companies that offer a cutting-edge 2D drafting solution. Without investi...
Future of 3D Design Microsoft’s HoloLens
In recent times, TV shows have been so inspiring that they made me think about how the future is shaped by adding new technology. Once ...
Engineers CAD Drinks
Autodesk Introduces Whisky Drinks for AutoCAD and CAD Drinks for Engineers – Helping Them Plot Their Own Cocktails. Now Autodesk user...
Intelligent P&IDs and their Advantages
Intelligent P&IDs for piping systems are 2D Piping & Instrumentation Diagrams generated using symbols for equipment, instruments...
What Education Do CAD Drafters (Designers) Need?
Today’s CAD designers will have to obtain, at the very minimum, an associate’s degree. Course work in this career field should ideall...
Paper Sketch to 3D Models
Paper Sketches to 3D Models - I’ve heard troubling talk over the use of sketches as a viable form of pre-design planning, and I’ve se...
CAD Drafters Career Opportunities
CAD Drafters Career Opportunities - Over the past several decades, CAD drafters career opportunities were a valid position to pursue with...
Virtual Reality and Future of CAD Design
A common problem for parents who are raising teenage children is to pull them away from computer games so that they would do homework and...
CAD Cloud Based
Cloud Service Based CAD What is Cloud Based CAD? In a simplistic sense, it means that instead of having CAD software resident locally on ...
CAD Software and Entrepreneur
A new trend is developing in the CAD industry, led by Dassault Systems. The CAD vendor makes the Solidworks software suite accessibl...
Electrical CAD Drafting In Construction Field
CAD plays a vital role in understanding the plan for the electrical fittings and creating CAD drawings. Before CAD machines wer...
What the ASTCAD CAD drafting blog covers
The ASTCAD CAD drafting blog is written by working drafters and engineers, which shapes what gets published: practical tutorials on AutoCAD, SolidWorks and Revit workflows, plain-language explainers on Australian drafting standards like AS 1100 and AS 4100, career guidance for drafters entering or advancing in the industry, and honest assessments of the technology waves — AI, automation, 3D printing — as they actually land in Australian drawing offices. Case-study articles walk through real project decisions, and conversion guides cover the file-format questions every multi-software office hits weekly.
How to use this blog
Articles are organised by discipline and linked between related topics, so a reader arriving on a DWG conversion guide will find the neighbouring articles on CAD standards and software selection without hunting. If you are researching a service — structural drafting, 3D scanning, BIM — the relevant articles link through to the service pages where our team can pick up the conversation. New articles are published regularly; the most useful entry points are linked below.
If there is a CAD, drafting or engineering documentation topic you want covered — or a question a client keeps asking you — tell us through the contact page. Reader questions have driven several of the most-read articles on this blog.
The blog also serves a quieter purpose: it is where we document the recurring questions from real client projects — the DWG version conflicts, the standards interpretation debates, the software licensing traps — so the next person searching that exact problem finds a straight answer written by someone who solved it last month. If an article here saved you an afternoon, that is the metric we publish against.
For readers who prefer a starting map: the standards articles anchor the reference material, the how-to-read-drawings guides serve site teams, the software tutorials serve drafters, and the career series serves people entering the industry. Everything else radiates from those four clusters.
New: AS 4100 Base Plate Design: The Limit State Procedure, Step by Step.
Tutorial: Step-by-step — creating your first CAD drawing.
Guide: CAD automation — a step-by-step implementation guide.