Produce a component drawing suitable for transfer onto a CAM system (Mechanical Engineering) - Essay Example

in the industry because of several reasons including improved design quality, increased productivity, establishment of data base for manufacturing, creation of standards for design and doing away of inaccuracies brought about by hand-copying of several drafting as well as drawings’ inconsistency (Introduction to CAD, 2008). CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) refers to the effective employment of the computer technology for manufacturing planning and control. CAM is concerned with manufacturing engineering processes including planning and scheduling of manufacturing processes, machining operations, control of quality of production processes and products as well as Numerical Control (NC) part programming.

Computer-aided manufacturing is usually integrated with Computer Aided Design in CAD/CAM systems. This allows movement of information from design section to product production planning with no need of entering the data manually on the part geometry(Introduction to CAD, 2008). CAM develops the information stored by CAD into information which is used as instructions for running and controlling production operations, machining, materials and equipment handling, product inspection and automatic testing.

The rationale for CAD/CAM comes out to justify improvements based on technology as far as manufacturing is concerned. This approach grows as a result of the need to make improvements on quality, productivity and product competitiveness. Other major reasons include: Better quality of the produced goods, better communication, higher production level, manufacturing common database, lowered prototype costs of construction and quicker customers’ response(Introduction to CAD, 2008). The necessary hardware part for a CAD/CAM system includes components such as a digital computer, workstation, plotters and output put devices as well as storage devices.

The system, in addition to this encompasses an interface communication which usually enables data transmission to other