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.
How to Solve Engineering problems with Finite Element Analysis (FEA)
Engineering problems with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) With finite element analysis or FEA services, you can easily find an apt solution...
How to do Reverse Engineering Using 3D Scanners to Generate…
Reverse Engineering Using 3D Scanners to Generate CAD Models The engineers of today lives and thrives in a 3D CAD model world. The CAD mo...
Importance of CAD Platforms in product designs
CAD Platforms in Product Designs In the present age of rapidly computerized applications and CAD product designs, it is very likely that ...
How to reduce design and drafting cost?
Do you know, how much it cost to design a home? Here, the answer is quite simple. All you require to do is to outsource ASTCAD Design &am...
How to CAD Modeling helping Water Distribution Systems
By using 3D modelling over the past 20 years, we have improved our engineer's ability to design, model, and fabricate complex parts ...
CAD importance in Product Development
CAD in Product Development - CAD and CAM are industrial computer applications, which have greatly reduced the time and cost cycles betwee...
Raster to Vector Conversion
Why you need your raster images to move towards vector images? Read on to find out more about Australian raster to vector conversion...
Proof-of-Principle Prototypes
Proof-of-Principle (PoP) Prototypes are one cornerstone of engineering design. PoP, referred to as Proof-of-Concept, prototyping&nbs...
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.