Working Drawings

Working drawings are the complete set of technical or instrumental drawings required to manufacture a design. They have strict guidelines that stipulate the way each drawing is laid out and what details need to be included. These guidelines or conventions are set out by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and mirrored by the Australian Standards (AS). This ensures that every designer (product, architect, graphic, engineer, civil etc) produces drawings that can be read by every manufacturer, builder, workperson, assembler or user around the world.

A set of working drawings typically consists of 'Detail Drawings' and 'Assembly Drawings'. In some occasions a 3-dimensional pictorial drawing can also be included to provide additional information if required.

Detail Drawings

Detail drawings are used as a primary reference for manufacturing an individual part. They must show all of the detail required to manufacture an individual component including a suitable number of fully dimensioned orthogonal views. It is convention for detailed drawings to contain only one part per drawing sheet; however, multi-detailed drawings can be used when it is more convenient to show a small number of simple individual parts on the same drawing.

Assembly and Sub-assembly Drawings

An Assembly drawing shows how all the individual parts fit together to make an assembly. They are drawn using an arrangement of orthogonal views and cut sections. To show how large complex parts are assembled, large assembly drawings are generally made up of smaller sub-assembly drawings. In the case of a mountain bike for example, the bike's frame would be considered a sub-assemble, the gear cogs and chain considered a separate sub-assembly and so on. All of these sub-assemblies would then assembly to form the finished mountain bike assembly.