Standard Parts Library for Technical Illustrations

Standard Parts Libraries are a real time saver when working on tight deadlines.

I remember during my stint as a Technical Illustrator working with SeSI India, I worked on multiple customers. Each customer had their own set of strict standards to adhere to. And it being Aerospace documentation, was more strict. I ended up with a lot of time having to recreate a bolt or a nut from scratch. This gave me an idea, I thought about saving the most used parts in a template — Nuts, Bolts, Screws, O-rings, Washers, Lugs, hydraulic, electrical, electronic etc. After a couple of months, the template was crowded with all these icons. I ended up increasing my speed creating and revising the drawings, as I need not to create single part each time. This productive habit saved me a bit of stress. I am going to share this idea in detail with you!

It is estimated that as much as 70 percent* of major product design consists of standard components such as fasteners, valves, and motors. The use of standard parts is essential for the design and assembly of products. As much as 25 percent of an engineer’s time is spent searching for standard parts used in the design of products. This productive time can be better focused on creating visual communication.

There is an easy go around for this problem which we as technical illustrators face. All hail! The great ‘Standard Parts Library’ saves our day. Usually, the 3D CAD programs like SolidWorks, Solid Edge have inbuilt standard part libraries which pretty much help in adding standard parts like fasteners, bearings, clips etc. I prefer searching for the standard fastener like M10 in these vast libraries. They serve the purpose majority of the time (when I have time !). But, I do feel like having a ready-made drag and drop solution to update the fasteners quickly.

Earlier, I used to have a template file in IsoDraw 7.0 containing the parts which I needed almost daily. But, this CAD extraction approach had its own quirks-

1. CAD extractions (drafting the model and saving it in a vector format e.g. *.cgm, *.dxf, *.ai) come along with tessellated data. Popularly known in tech-pubs lingo as ‘3D lines’. They serve no purpose other than increasing file size and time required to cleaning them up.
2. Most of the complex CAD Assemblies have the standard parts e.g. rivets/fasteners absent in them. Since, technically standard parts are not drawn as details normally are purchased, not manufactured, for the assembly. This keeps 3D file size lower too!
3. CAD data is not flexible — Parts like, wires, cables, straps, chains etc. will be in a straight line. We need to create them realistically in the illustration software.
4. There is an on-going trend that Technical Author handle graphic requirements of User documentation. I have observed Technical Author’s using CAD extracted fasteners. Since illustration part is not the primary focus of Technical Author, quality gets affected due to ‘this looks good enough to me’ phenomenon. Which means there is less of standardization, creativity and realism along with simple illustration techniques such as line style, halos and cutaways not being used.

CAD Product icons created by http://jrgraphix.net

Above things can be overcome by either building a symbol library of our own. It is really a time saver and causes no stress when meeting strict client deadlines. There are some basic guidelines we can follow when building our own symbol library.

1. Building a library is a tedious and one time endeavor. You can start by creating an worksheet in Excel for the kinds of fasteners which you frequently use.
2. Start generating the required fasteners in SolidWorks/Solid Edge from the standard parts library.
3. Draft the generated fasteners onto a drawing sheet and ‘save as’ to correct vector format. If you use CATIA, save it as *.cgm and for SolidWorks/SolidEdge save as *.dxf formats.
4. Open the vector in illustrating program of your choice (IsoDraw/Illustrator).
5. Add the required line weights and fills and repeat the procedure for other fasteners.
6. You can refer to ‘symbol library’ for a very detail and precise instructions on managing library in Adobe Illustrator.

Now unless you are busy like a CEO or lazy like crocodile, then I would like to recommend you to some really good standard parts libraries! :^)

• Code Zebra contains a huge library of standard symbols available across 80 libraries. It seems like a good collection to me, but price seems to be a bit high. USD $89 per Library or USD $359 for all seven categories (Architectural, Landscaping, Building Services, Electrical, Fasteners, General and Mechanical).
• Kevin Hulsey’s — Reusable Vector Line Art offers another fastener library. What I love about this is the specific selection of parts available in greater variety of angles. This costs USD $50.
• Matthew Jennings’s Industrial Artworks has a pretty awesome technical library. It has set of fasteners, power connectors, or computer/AV connectors, all in vector format ready to use in illustrations, instruction manuals or parts diagrams. The illustrations show a nice attention to detail and line weight. They are available in 14 categories and he keeps on updating them. I love this library because Matt has not made the vectors in symbol format. Since, when the artwork is a symbol the line thicknesses will scale when transforming. It is better to set the lines thickness to the required standard first and then create symbols afterwards if needed. All libraries are saved in an Adobe Illustrator CS5 *.eps file. This can be used in virtually all vector editors. Compared to most Vector Stock sites Matt’s libraries represent excellent value for money. They are reasonably priced at £10–15 (USD $16–25), but with far more artwork for our money.

Matthew Jennings's library features 32 of the most used ports and connectors found on the rear of computers and AV systems. This set costs is a real time-saver for anyone producing documentation for Computer products. Can be found at: http://www.industrial-artworks.co.uk/technical_library.html

I personally feel Matt’s libraries are the way to go. Just get them and we no longer need to fuss about Googling image and tracing it just to show that damn connector in illustration!

*70% value is an reference taken from ‘Fundamentals of Graphics Communication’ by Bertoline-Wiebe