RE: CAD Drawing Standard/Drawing Office Procedur

From: <Christopher>
Date: Wed Jul 19 2000 - 12:21:00 EDT

>Now this may date back to my manual drafting days, but I was
>always taught to draw & print well

Point taken, but I'd say that cosmetic issues are generally addressed by CAD software itself. Presumably the designer has the wit not to mix fonts or text and line sizes and line widths. These issues are covered in existing ANSI standards anyway.

It's important to distinguish cosmetic issues from draftsmanship. Lettering quality and lines widths were issues with manual drafting, but not with CAD. The problem is that too many PhB's look at a CAD print, get dazzled by the neat letters and uniform lines, and don't realize that the drawing itself is a disorganized piece of crap. Standards sometimes help the ignorant, but they'll never change a hack into a designer. The problem with disoraganized layering is pretty straightforward and easy to fix. It's an example of poor organization, and you've already seen the reason to standardize.

>I'm trying to make the standards more like guidelines
Bad philosophy. An optional standard standardizes nothing--it's a suggestion at the very best and with a built-in reason to ignore. Maybe the thing to do is make up a 4 hour lecture covering expected good practices for your new hires rather than a standards manual.

>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!
I bet that's a big part of your problem--too many standards, not too few.

Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant from <a href="/group/PipingDesign/post?postID=BBR-ImB3dXnSYyIFwh-IyH5KstSInAoWxA1qKfEmlxc61_pCE8PqFEURi3NLjEVG_huEPUytBhUH">chrisw@skypoint.com</a> | this distance" (last words of Gen.

___________________________| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864)

<a href="http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw">http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw</a> Received on Wed Jul 19 12:21:00 2000