Also - my estimate spreadsheet includes a column for PLS Professional Supervision of 1/10 hr per hour of staff time. This is completely separate from my estimate of time to complete the task at hand.
This, but 1/8. Every project I estimate has one hour of PLS/PM time for every eight of field and office tech time. So, a project with five field days and five tech days starts with ten hours of PLS/PM time before accounting for their "actual" work effort.
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.
NAP Not a Problem. I did not take your post any way but how you like doing things. My posts here are often reactionary, indiscriminate and taken to serious. The last thing I want is someone worrying about offending my feeling. I lost my feelings about two months into corporate employment. I have been a solo provider since 1999 and do most everything different from how most posters do the same. I hope my input give the younger posters a different view.
As far as the pertinent post goes, I no longer use a ‘field to finish’ type procedure but just collect raw data. I use a simple fieldbook sketch with simple point nomenclature that allows me to easily finish the drawing in the office and spend less time standing on the side of the road. Analyzing closures, adjacent deeds, monumentation alignment and multi-instrument data is easier on a big screen with the appropriate software, in a comfy chair.
A good party chief knows how far to take his part and what he can leave for office personnel. For you it might be to leave little for the office to screw up. For me, since I have incredible drafters, awesome survey technicians and the best office manage ever, I just make sure I collect more than enough data to complete the task.
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.
The party chief using the correct field to finish coding takes care of the connecting lines. So that should be able to be easily handled without a specific COGO/CAD program on a tablet - any data collection software should work just fine. That was being accomplished off of the old TDS software on HP calculators, as long as the field crew coded things correctly - about 30 years ago.
Are their still data collectors and software combinations being sold that do not have the capability of showing the line work as points are collected? I thought they all did that and allowed the user to connect lines between points to be exported as well as being able to COGO in points that used to have to be measured and recorded in a field book (i.e. measuring in house corners that were not shot directly).
The following is not a hard and fast rule, but:
I find the opposite of "Any simple 2-D survey should be 90% completed while in the field." to be so. The simple surveys have, in my experience, had so little line work that even manually having to connect the boundary, road, house, etc... points would be a very small percent of the CAD work required. I find that the 90% is usually spent more in editing title blocks, notes, adding extra dimensions, pulling in additional data such as the digital flood layer and other functions best accomplished in the office.
It is the less simple surveys where the proper field coding (and perhaps ability of the party chief to access CAD) save a higher percent of CAD time in the office. Don't connect the dots on a 50-100 point lot survey versus don't connect the dots on a 10,000 point large industrial site could (depending on what the 10,000 points represent) be much different percentages of the wasted time connecting the points up.
Of course some simple mortgage surveys may have more points than some large sites. So proper/consistent field coding should be done on every job if that is the company procedure.
One of my prior bosses was close to Chris' estimate. He stated that it was roughly 2 hours office time (as Chris pointed out for various office aspects, not just drafting) for each 1 hour of field time. That was just a general rough idea as some types of work would vary the relationship between office and field.
Doing pretty much exclusively boundary work, I seem to have about a 1 to 1 relationship (guesstimated as I don't track it too closely). But that is with me personally doing all the courthouse, field and office work. I bet that wouldn't hold up if I wasn't involved in every aspect.
Mentor #4? Mentor #7? Did a survey every 11 days for 38 years, he had a 1/2 Time helper any time he was in the field. The way he described it was that they started at 7am in the driveway and they were hopefully home by 11am. He drafted or otherwise did office stuff and answered the phone from 1pm to 5pm. They figured a boundary survey (or an ALTA) took 40 hours with a 1/2 time helper. The google prices are not really helping and those people need to be put on notice of their disinformation. I have yet to make sense of the statistics in any profitable way, and I yield my time.
@field-dog It has been many years since i have done mortgage loan surveys. Well i did one a couple years ago but it was way overkill mapped for a purdy picture for boss son. When we did those in the 90’s. We hardly ever used an instrument at all. 100 ft steel tape plumb bobs range poles stacked at the back corners pull sidelines set backs. Chained everything in as long as things worked. Sometimes we would turn a plat bearing for a check. All hand sketched House everything. All closures cked in field. A good two man crew sometimes 3 if everyone knew what they were doing and followed procedures we could bust out 8 to 10 a day if they were stacked in a logistics manner so close proximity to each other. Now we had deeds and plats in field packets. When we dropped off those that evening. More than a 8 hour day. The manual drafter would have a stack of the previous days drafted with notes if he needed answers and a red pen. We would review those mark up and he would fix the following day. He was hood. Cad was coming along so we were trying new ways and finding the sweet spot with total stations and data collector. Or on board wild t1000 and running wild soft. I still hollar chain and if we are cutting a foot my head chainman should hollar cutting a foot. Me reading’s 33.24 cutting a foot 32.24. Head chainman good. My old boss then would say when i come to check on yall you better be dancing around that property like a ballerina show that the wealthy would like to see. We had no gps phones so old city map books. The navigator better have a darn good reason that when the crew chief rolled up we should be on the correct side of the street of our lot etc. every person had a job and the correct tool. No going back to the truck or van. No excuses. I could not do what i did back the. Today as fast and smoothly as we did then. I honestly still have doubts that a robot is faster than a good i man and chief with a total station. In that environment. But I guess if i were solo that i would have to figure out. It tqkes longer to build a job file and connect robot then just setting up a total station and begin measuring
All. Thank you all. Sorry just getting back to the house was on a site doing fieldwork as one of my chiefs could not make it. So had a little fun teaching my youngest chief a few things. I am lucky he just has a great attitude and loves to learn. Catches on quickly. He is very new to trimble so little things like BS cks and measure codes. Also teaching him how to double code and such made for a fun couple days. But that youngster walked my short legged fat belly but to death. . I had to drink liquid asprin for dinner so my pain didn’t show.
I am pretty comfortable and confident in field to finish and linework. I have not yet got fancy with blocks rotation of blocks adding text for signs rotated automatically like i did years ago with sdrmap and tmoss etc. yet with Trimble access and tbc or Civil 3d. If it can be done which I assume it can we did it years ago. If it can be done in the field seems for those smaller simpler drafting jobs you would be very close to completion. Of course standard notes specific notes like owners name pb db pg number etc. would help. We had a description code so i could take a shot and it would display the text like state route xxx 30 ft row asphalt or gravel was labeled almost perfectly for final plat. Have not tried that yet either. But i have learned that where i am all the decisions are made from office vs field so crews go out to do boundary work with out a deed or plat but maybe if lucky a csv file and a sketch printed if they are lucky. I computed a deed and had some discrepancy on some of the corners over history so i let my crews know axel original rebar or pipe and if I feel they may all not be in the same position i will try and let them know look wither x radious etc. don’t just locate the first thing maggie sounds off on. Now time to rest so i can get back to learning drafting lol.
Ok I am getting better at estimating how long field work should take and how long it will take me to get the data qa/qced and adjusted and ready for boundary decisions and then to drafting the PURDY plat or map etc.
Do yall have a rule of thumb that is a ratio or multiplier of say a topo or mapping or even a boundary survey that takes 8 hours of field time should be drafted in 1.5 x’s more or less to have the final drafting deliverable completed. As a newbie to drafting I already know I am slow as molasses on a cold day. But I am trying to set myself some milestones as I learn and improve.
For boundary surveys there's usually not a lot of drafting to do and, at least as far as my own workflow goes, I end up doing most of that drafting as part of the record research for the site anyway. So boundaries are kind of an oddity that way. I will say it's usually a bit quicker to draft up a lot in a subdivision than a metes and bounds with section ties, etc.
Topos can vary quite a bit. I worked at a place that didn't use auto-linework so I spent probably 2-5 days just connecting dots. If the crew codes things for auto-linework then that shaves off like 80% of the time. If the person who did the fieldwork is also doing the drafting then that probably shaves off another 5-10%.
Having a crappy template, block library, layer standard and all of that makes simple things a nightmare too.
Anyway, long of the short is it just varies too much to say.
For boundary surveys there's usually not a lot of drafting to do ....
Speak for yourself. Hereabouts finishing the fieldwork on boundary puts you about half done. Maybe less.
I certainly agree with your comments about F2f, templates, blocks, etc.
@bstrand I started today on a deed getting some of the work done making notes for my crew that is heading down. It has not one bearing nor a exact distance. It reads something like this. Beginning at the mouth of xx creek and river on west side of road heading towards xxxx property along xxx property line to xxx property and thence along that property towards xxx river to a sycamore that’s about 160 ft below in the hollar then about 75 to 80 ft to xx river then up the river then a 90 bend at xxx property and along property to point of beginning. These are what i love more than anything. You can throw out all the fancy tools and just read and re read and look for the evidence lol. This is what i missed more than anything about surveying. To be honest. But its not the ones you make the big bucks on. But once you nail it down and do the checks it’s what its all about.
There are too many ways to gather data to correlate hours. For us office varies from 0.5 to 4 times field effort.
