Pencil and paper is a good start for the planning stage. After that I dunno...
Del

Having assembled a few of those sorts of thing over the years, I can tell you that, to create the assembly instructions included with most items, it is imperative that you have never seen one of these, and never assembled one yourself.

It is also helpful if you are not a native speaker of whatever language you are creating the assembly drawing for.

Oh, and be certain to include items in the drawing that are not contained in the small parts package... do not include them in the assembly, just show them in the list of required parts.

Kidding aside, do you have some more specific issue? Just about any light CAD program can quite easily handle this sort of drawing. I use DesignCAD 3D MAX for most applications around here. A Google search finds many vendors of the software on the 'net for around $20-$30 US bucks.

http://www.j-jay.com/wordless_instructions.html

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=illustrator&loc=en_us

For similar projects, I imported CAD drawings of the product (including exploded-views) into CorelDRAW. Many of the little extras, such as the illustration of the hammer, are available as clip-art.

Sonny, the instructions are generated poorly at best. Even checking with inexperienced persons would produce better results. Multiple sins.

Greetings CAD1 -

Excellent question. I create shop drawings for fabrication and technical details for construction materials and solar. My best tool is AutoCAD 2012 allowing for both 2D and 3D graphics that can be easily dimensioned to enhance content. It also allows for easily repeating drawings/objects and showing from differing view points. As written descriptions and material lists are critical a program with the ability to import Word, Excel, photos and other outputs should be considered. There are many trained and educated technicians available to assist you on Craigslist. A cost and time effective solution for you is perhaps Google Sketch which has many features and is easy to learn. Wish you the best!

M>

That takes me back, I can remember drawing the 3D exploded views by hand before I was using CAD. Now, as mentioned before, I would just take the exploded view straight from Inventor.