If You Want to Experiment...

If You Want to Experiment

There are many valuable uses for polylines beyond those covered in this chapter. I encourage you to become familiar with this unique object so you can take full advantage of AutoCAD.

To further explore the use of polylines, try the following exercise, illustrated in Figure 13.30. It will give you an opportunity to try some of the options discussed in this chapter that weren't included in exercises:

Figure 13.30: Drawing a simple plate with curved edges

1. Open a new file called PART14. Set the Snap mode to 0.25 , and be sure that Snap mode is on. Use the Pline command to draw the object shown in step 1 of Figure 13.30. Draw it in the direction indicated by the arrows and start at the upper-left corner. Use the Close option to add the last line segment.

2. Start the Pedit command, select the polyline, and then type E to issue the Edit Vertex option. At the prompt

   [Next/Previous/Break/Insert/Move/Regen/Straighten/Tangent/ Width/eXit] <N>:

   press until the X mark moves to the first corner, shown in step 2 of Figure 13.30. Enter S for the Straighten option.

3. At the prompt

   Enter an option [Next/Previous/Go/eXit] <N>:

   press twice to move the X to the other corner shown in step 2 of Figure 13.30. Press G for Go to straighten the polyline between the two selected corners.

4. Press twice to move the X to the upper-right corner, and then enter I for Insert. Pick a point as shown in step 3 of Figure 13.30. The polyline changes to reflect the new vertex. Enter X to exit the Edit Vertex option, and then press to exit the Pedit command.

5. Start the Fillet command and use the Radius option to set the fillet radius to .30. Press to start the Fillet command again, but this time use the Polyline option and pick the polyline you just edited. All the corners fillet to the .30 radius. Add the .15 radius circles as shown in step 4 of Figure 13.30 and exit the file with the End command.