The machinerys handbook is the primary source of information for just about anything related to mechanical design. Pipe sizes, manufacturing processes, mathematics , practical stress, strain and deflection tables and on and on and on.

If you have just one engineering reference book this should be the one. Most draftsmen I know keep their copies held together with a big elastic band because the books are falling apart from constant use.

I am not a big fan of the CD version. There is no provision for adjusting font sizes when printing dimension charts and data from the CD. The fonts are as tiny as in the print version, and once you know where the charts are, you can look them up just as fast in the print version. But of course, thats just my opinion, you may find the CD version works just fine for your purposes.

There is also a drafting symbol and drafting template resource page if you need drafting symbol libraries. Check there for information on drafting symbols.

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Engineering Calculators

There are some pretty fancy engineering calculators around but I have found that the simple ones get the most use. I have used an HP-11C since 1989 (I bought it used from a professional engineer I worked with) and it still gets used daily.

I have a second calculator made by Sonin which adds, multiplies, divides and subtracts fractions and that is a real time saver. It too gets used on a daily basis.


I also make use of laser measurers and have a page set up a seperate page to talk about laser distance meters and related equipment.