RE: CAD Drawing Standard/Drawing Office Procedur

Chris does have a point in that there's no point in over complicating things, but I also believe that the "cosmetic issue" is all too often overlooked. Now this may date back to my manual drafting days, but I was always taught to draw & print well and that it should be legible even after something as big as A0 has been microfilmed and them reproduced as an A3. I know that this doesn't really apply anymore, what with drawings being stored electronically these days, but it doesn't take any extra time to do something neatly verses just "slapping it in there" when you look at the job as a whole.
What I mean is if you take the time to put everything on there own levels e.g. text, centrelines, dims, etc. at the start it makes the next guys job who has to come along and update the drawing that much easier. This is one of my pet hates, when I have to update somebody else's drawing and it takes me a few minutes to figure out what the hell he's done, with text, centrelines, dims, etc. all on the same level or worse still on all the levels, this makes it very hard to be able to just switch off the text and stretch something around without affecting anything else (to me this is wasting the potential of the software and limiting your flexibility within the design).
Now you may well be saying that this is just poor design skills on their part, but this is what the schools and colleges are churning out now and exactly what I'm trying to put right!

I'm trying to make the standards more like guidelines and not project specific that's why I'm hoping people will be good enough to let me have copies of their standards so that I can put something together that will hopefully cover all the angles. I'm not going to mess around with things like the way we number drawings as that has evolved here and seems to work pretty well, it's not great but it would be too big a job to even think about!
What I'm looking at is the basics, things like text height/width, line thicknesses, layering, etc. At the moment we are between projects, we've just moved offices and we've just got our first full size plotter, so if we're going to do it now is the time to implement something.

I'm not trying to re-invent the wheel here, I'm just looking at the way we currently do things and trying to put it into writing so that we all do it the same way.
It won't be fixed in stone, I hope it will evolve as we find new, better or more productive ways of doing things. It also means that when I go and the next person comes along he/she will have somewhere to start. When I started here 3 years ago I had no handover as there hadn't been a CAD department for about a year so the drawings were in a right state! Now we've got them sorted out I want to keep it that way, and make my successor's life easier.

Paul has raised an interesting idea in that we create a standard design package and then just tailor it to each specific project and to a certain extent we already do that.
Each type of project is basically the same, so we utilise the P&ID's from a previous project of the same type, but the 3D design is always from scratch as the physical size and shape of the skids and the equipment they contain are always different.
I agree in that it would be nice to have a standard set of P&ID's with our own line numbers, instrument numbers, etc. but we are a sub-contractor for the big engineering contractors so we get told how they each want the numbering to go, and believe me they all have a different system! Even two different jobs from the same engineering contractor will have different ways of numbering!

Thanks to those that have helped me out so far.

Nathan Emerson. Received on Wed Jul 19 04:31:00 2000