I've known surveyors who made believable claims of field to finish pretty much drawing the map in the field.
This is 2023. A good party chief should be equipped with a COGO-CAD program running on a tablet. Any simple 2-D survey should be 90% completed while in the field.
A good party chief should be equipped with a COGO-CAD program running on a tablet. Any simple 2-D survey should be 90% completed while in the field.
I'm not understanding what a "simple 2-D survey" is.
Aside from the fact that every survey I do is done in 3D (recording vertical data is just too easy not to do it), if it's just a boundary that will ultimately be mapped in 2D there's nothing to draft that's worth looking at while in the field, and I rarely attempt to reconcile all the boundary evidence while in the field anyway -- I much prefer to deal with adjustments and boundary analysis while in the comfort of my office. And if it's a topo, there's way too much detail to fuss with while in the field.
No tablet in my truck. If that makes me a bad party chief (of a 1-man crew!), so be it.
I've known surveyors who made believable claims of field to finish pretty much drawing the map in the field.
This is 2023. A good party chief should be equipped with a COGO-CAD program running on a tablet. Any simple 2-D survey should be 90% completed while in the field.
Then I am not a good party chief. Doing CAD on a tablet, in a truck, on a field site has to be the least efficient and less desirable thing I can think of.
I'm not understanding what a "simple 2-D survey" is.
I'm thinking a mortgage, or boundary and improvement, survey. Find the property corners, tie the house to the boundary, and draw the house. If you use line work, simply connect the dots.
Find the property corners, tie the house to the boundary, and draw the house.
No wonder I didn't understand it - that kind of survey pretty much doesn't exist here in CA.
Then I am not a good party chief.
I'm not going to argue that point. I do want to point out that party chiefs should be familiar with CAD, even if they don't use it in the way that I've described. I've seen time being wasted on locating objects in an inefficient manner because the party chief is clueless as to how a CAD operator would draw it. One very simple example is worrying about the elevation of a fire hydrant.
Find the property corners, tie the house to the boundary, and draw the house.
Add boundary levels, enough spot heights to contour the lot and some road detail.
Two of them per day for TOO many years.
extensive use of field to finish coding,
This is the key...
And knowing how to use it, helps.
@field-dog But the flange elevation on the fire hydrant is important. There are codes limiting what that elevation can be. If you were to asbuilt one for the municipality's inspector, you better worry about the elevation of the fire hydrant.
Rule of thumb for rough numbers is the projected field COST x 1.5. (Office costs less than field.)
Put together with field overruns, etc it usually comes out about right.
The type of survey I was trying to describe to Jim is a typical Florida mortgage survey. I guess they're labeled "mortgage" because they're ordered by title companies whenever homes are purchased. A bank doesn't want to finance any more than it has to. A finished floor elevation, the lowest floor, was obtained. A typical mortgage survey used to cost around $275. We'd knock out 4 to 6 per day. You would include a small amount of road detail showing type (asphalt or dirt) of road and curb and gutter if it existed. The boundary was tied to the nearest PC or block corner.
But the flange elevation on the fire hydrant is important.
In your case, yes. Other cases too. One surveyor I worked for wanted to know the "reveal" of a fire hydrant. He described that as being the amount of water pipe revealed between the bottom flange of the fire hydrant and the ground.
If you're a party chief, working for a company with multiple crews; you are the only one that sees the project, most of the time. You better get it right the first time; no matter how long it takes. If you're second guessing what your crew is telling you; you're doing it wrong.
If you're a solo surveyor; then it's nobody's fault but yours.
That's it, in a nut shell; YMMV.
Dougie
I didn't intend to be cocky or sarcastic in my response to your "Then I am not a good party chief." statement. I respect your opinion. I assume that you're a business owner and you have to run a profitable business. Maybe "running a CAD program" is too broad of a statement. Maybe I'm trying to say let's replace drawing in a field book with drawing on a tablet.
Based on your posts, it seems you are running with Trimble hardware/software. Have you built a feature library yet for Trimble Access? I'd recommend it as soon as possible and let the field teams use it for real time on-screen linework as they shoot. We've been able to minimize our crossing lines/breaklines and miscoded shots to less than 1% error...makes real quick work of CAD import and basic surface generation.
