AutoCAD Mechanical has the features we need for generating welding details and surface finish details quickly. Conveniently, Anvil exports into AutoCAD quite easily. Mechanical Desktop opened Northern Blower's door again to the benefits of 3D and particularly the ability to apply parametrics to resize drawn objects easily without redrawing. We use 3D for these custom fans which represent about 40 percent of the product line. The newer lines are where we're seeing most of the progress with Mechanical Desktop at this point.
Fowler reports a dramatic competitive advantage over the old package.
For our custom heavy duty lines, Mechanical Desktop allows us to generate the product quickly and accurately. It gives us information that used to take a long time to generate. We need weights, surface areas and so on to determine material requirements and physical data. With the other package, you had to add all the components up individually. With Mechanical Desktop, as part of the assembly, it will tell you all that information automatically.