Guest Post: Draw a circle with radius tangent to two objects

Today’s post is from Jason Bewerk. Jason is a blogger and CAD-enthusiast. He works full-time at a design firm and enjoys helping others with CAD and thus started 12CAD.com to provide detailed tutorials and exercises for everybody to use.

In the exercise below, you don’t draw the entire figure, but just focus on creating the circles that would be the basis for the figures perimeter.

We have the image below to replicate, and luckily we are given all dimensions, which will make the task simpler. Today’s difficulty is simply to learn how to draw a circle with specified radius tangent to two objects. As you can see from the figure below, we need to be able to create the R180 circle and R75 circle.

The line AB in the figure below forms an angle of 30 degrees with the horizontal. To draw this line, follow these steps:

1. Activate the LINE command
2. Click on point A
3. Write @210<30
4. Hit the ENTER key

To obtain the two large circles, you will have to make sure the OBJECT SNAP mode is set in a way to let AutoCAD detect Tangent points, and use the CIRCLE command shown below.


By Ellen Finkelstein