I got a detail for some crazy steel stairs that have to be installed at a sewage treatment plant we're working on. They turn at different angles and the supports are therefore out of square with one another. I tried using their reference lines to re-create the basic position so I would be able to layout the anchor bolts. Lo and behold their reference lines were drawn but several dimensions were not tied to them which made them useless.
I reached out to the steel company that produced the drawings after spending a couple hours trying to sort this out and they provided me with the missing dimensions. Great except that caused even more problems. They did not fit with the previously provided dimensions.
I finally asked if they could just send the CAD file so I can insert it into the drawing and that doesn't fit either! The dimensions shown on the paper drawings don't match the dimensions in CAD! Why would anyone work this way??? Do they just draw something in CAD that looks nice and then do all the geometry somewhere else?? Makes no sense....
Maybe since it was for a fixture in a sewage treatment plant, they thought they'd just give you a crappy drawing to work with.:'(
My thoughts exactly!
There are people who live in a different world than what we do. They believe that if they draw two lines that might be halfway close to a certain angle all they need to do then is insert what that angle is really supposed to be. You know, sort of draw two lines with an interior angle, by eyeball, at 70 degrees then insert the words "72 degrees 24 minutes". Then they use the same drawing for something else but change the words to be 69 degrees 58 minutes. They think they're pitching horseshoes or hand grenades and close is good enough.
This is extremely frustrating......I'm gonna lose the rest of my hair by the time I figure this out! Not that far to go!
Stay away from pool companies, too...
I did a topo of a high-end piece of residential property for installation of an in-ground swimming pool; lots of easements and set-back lines to deal with. I provided the pool company a CAD file of the site.
A few months later the homeowner called me to layout the pool site for construction. After getting started it didn't take too long before I realized something wasn't jiving...at all.
Long story short: The "drafter" for the pool company couldn't get his pool drawing to fit the site topo I had prepared...so he scaled up my drawing by some random amount so his pool would "fit". :pinch:
..true story, sadly..
Sounds like an architect was involved!
Stay away from pool companies, too...
A few years ago I went out to a lake development to stake a house and patio and garage layout on a lake lot with water on three sides.
The Architect had jacked the boundaries around and stretched them outward so his creation would fit on paper.
The same could not fit on the ground and I had to meet with the builder and we had to change the alignment of the house with the garage and tilt the whole thing about 10° counterclockwise to get it to fit within building lines.
He used something called Reddit to draw the buildings and sent me his drawing with dimensions that would not close around the house. That darned thing had a dozen offsets of less than 3ft.
The builder said half his job was going to be sawing brick to fit.
Stay away from pool companies, too...
> He used something called Reddit to draw the buildings ....
Probably you mean Revit. And that is just the package that Autodesk makes for Architects, sort of an analog to C3d for Engineers.
Stay away from pool companies, too...
We were staking out a the baseball field at a new high school a few years ago.. I picked the bases from CAD, and the crew staked them out. A couple days later, the contractor calls and wants to know why the bases are shorter than regulation. I double checked the CAD file and discovered that the idiot draftsman had scaled the entire ball field to fit the space available. Had we staked it to regulation size, the outfield warning track would have been 20 feet down a 2:1 slope headed towards a swamp.
Stay away from pool companies, too...
> > He used something called Reddit to draw the buildings ....
> Probably you mean Revit. And that is just the package that Autodesk makes for Architects, sort of an analog to C3d for Engineers.
Revit is every bit a powerful as C3D and compatible with vanilla AutoCAD and C3D. I recall an early Revit training video that showed how to correctly orient an architectural site plan to an externally referenced (XREF) Civil 3D topo and proposed road alignment. Big selling point was getting everyone on the same coordinate system.
That brings us back to "[msg=308750]I Will Never EVER Understand (CAD/Software/Computers) by Plumb Bill @, Friday, March 20, 2015, 09:27[/msg]"
> How any company can justify paying BIG $$$ for software/equipment, and not paying small $ for some training!
>"Learning-on-the-fly" sounds good, but (in my experience) costs way more in the end.
Surveying and Civil firms are not the only victims of this mind set. Architects and many branches of engineering do not understand the concept of a real world coordinate system. They get in CAD or a related design software and the lower left corner of the design becomes 0,0,0 because that is the way they have always done design. Getting the design on the site is not their problem.
The whole concept is a bit like taking someone that has only driven a Ford Model T and dumping them in a high performance Corvette. If they have 10 acres of flat pavement without light poles they may survive!
Stay away from pool companies, too...
A couple of years ago we staked out a soccer field for the local high school. There was at least a 3 foot grade difference from one end of the field to the other. And that was designed by an engineer.
That's called home field advantage
You make sure you are running downhill towards the end of the game while the opponent must run uphill.
This sounds eerily like that post yesterday....
About the 7 perpendicular lines.
Your day was bad as mine.