Let’s get down to some nitty gritty.

There has been a name change for the command switch ray/xline. It is now called Ray Mode. Sounds so much cooler. This allows you, when using any construction line command, to either only draw lines to infinity in both directions or only in one direction.

I am going to take you through some of these construction lines.

You have Horizontal, Vertical and Cross construction lines. This is useful because if you have your Ortho Mode off you do not have to switch it on to get lines parallel to the x and y axis.

2 points or angle construction line

This allows you to create a construction line by specifying a start point and then a second point or an angle.

You will notice that after you specify the first point there are 3 numbers. 30,45 and 60. These have been pre-setup and if I press enter it will create 3 lines at the angles of 30,45 and 60.

When drawing in vanilla AutoCAD and you want to offset many lines parallel to another you use the multiple sub-command available to you. But if you have to do a few lines you have to click quite a few times. In ACADM we can take care of this with the Parallel with full Distance command and even have different distances between the lines that you are creating.

Here I have specified 10,15 and 33 as the distances it needs to offset the construction lines I am going to create.

Wanted to draw a construction line parallel to another and not have to work out the angle.

so easy !!

Need to find the line that bisects 2 other lines at an angle to each other?

Activate the Bi-sect command. Select your first line, select your second line and you get your bisecting construction line.

The Tangent to circle commands allows us to create 2 parallel construction lines tangent to a circle that you specify.

Activate the Tangent Command. Specify the circle that you want the lines to be tangent to and then specify the direction you want the lines to go.

2-circle Tangent is a nice option to specify a construction line that is tangent to 2 circles that you specify.

The last two I want to show you is these.

Circle Tangent to 2-Lines – This allows you to select 2 lines and then it creates a construction circle. Very much like Circle – Tan Tan Radius.

Rectangle on Circle – This creates a rectangular construction line around the circle that you specify.

So as you can see if you want construction lines you will get construction lines in AutoCAD Mechanical.