I never expected to ever see this happen

Posted by: @holy-cow

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  He told me he had done something similar years before when he put his engineer's stamp on a boundary survey, instead of his surveyor's stamp.

I did worse than that:  almost 4 years after starting my own firm I filed a Record of Survey that showed all the set monuments as being marked with my former employer's license number.  The actual monuments were marked with my number, but when drafting the map I absent-mindedly reverted to the habit of using his number.  I discovered the mistake 4 years later when doing another survey in the same area, and included a note on the newer map noting the error.  Oops.

Another review story.  DO NOT INTENTIONALLY mislead other people.  This is a PLSSia story but it would fit rare cases of breaking down any large tract.  What was to be created was  the NE4 of the SW4 of a common section.  The four sides of the section are shown as straight lines with the four quarter corners shown at being at the midpoint of each line.  The Center Corner is reported as being set at the intersection of the lines connecting the quarter section lines.  But, that is not where it was set.  By a long ways.  The bearing for the line connecting the N quater corner to the C corner is roughly 30 arc minutes different from that of the line connecting the C cornr to the S quarter corner.  That defletion amounts to about 24 feet.  Thus the monumented corner must be roughly 12 feet west of the calculated corner.

Add in that the line from the W quarter corner to the NW corner is nearly the same distance as that from the C corner to the N quarter corner, but, the distance from the E quarter corner to the NE corner is roughly 60 feet longer than the first two lines.  That is impossible if all data shown is correct.

A review story from from a common city block in ANYTOWN USA.  The client owned the entire north half of a typical block.  The existing six- 50' by 120' deep lots were to be to become three- 100' by 120' deep lots.  New LOT ! consisted of the prior Lots 1 & 2.  THE NEW LOT  2 consisted of the prior Lots 3 & 4.  THE NEW LOT 3 consisted of  prior Lots 5 & 6.  How can we screwed that up?  It happened.  The labels on the drawing showed that prior lots 1 & 2 were THE NEW LOT 3 and the prior Lots 5 & 6 were THE NEW LOT 1.  Of course, NEW LOT 2 was fine either way.  Something must be changed to get the drawing and the descriptions to agree.  I received a phone call demanding to know why I had a problem with an otherwise perfect drawing.  We were on the phone at least ten minutes before the light bulb in his head turned on.

How many of us have signed off on a survey assembled by a draftsman that has incorrect line lengths and areas for the following reasons?

Lines have been broken and a zigzag added to indicate the true line length is significantly longer than as shown.  But, the draftsman showed the length of the now-shortened stub as being the full length. Or picks the two end points and lists that as being the true length.

Monument symbols have been shown, then the lines still visible within the symbol are trimmed out.  Then, as above happens.  Much tougher to find.

When I was at AKDOT, I was reviewing a set of plans for a project and noticed that the survey sheet, which was drawn by the engineering drafting pool had the surveyors name and number in the stamp, but the outer ring said ENGINEER. They edited an engineers stamp block rather than asking where the surveyors block was, they were all on the same server.

With the line thing, where I worked in OR, the guys putting the final touches on the Subdivisions would use the BPOLY command to create the closure report, problem was if the monument symbols were left on, the report would have a small curve at each corner of the report, which made the areas wrong also, a side note to this that always irritates me is that they would just do it and hand it off to me for checking, I was trained to check my own work before handing up the line, no matter how much I pointed it out, I would get the same thing next time too.

Posted by: @holy-cow

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Monument symbols have been shown, then the lines still visible within the symbol are trimmed out..... 

Build your monument symbol blocks with a WIPEOUT for the interior. Then there is no need to trim the lines. Quality control.

I worked for a person who insisted that the lines be trimmed within the monument symbol. I refused. Perhaps he grew up with drafting by hand. What are we doing here? Trying to defeat the pupose of using the computer? Education would put an end to such ignorance.

I reviewed a bunch of easement sketches for sanitary sewer easements.  I would pull them up on the computer, read them, and click on the polylines to check the areas.  OOOOPS.  One property owner complained and I rechecked "my" work.  It turned out the draftsman had scaled the drawing rather than using paper space.  I NEVER did that again.  As a quick check I would multiply the length by the easement width.  Not entirely accurate, but I didn't make that mistake (NOT an error) again.

Andy

One time, and one time only, I made a huge mistake by reversing the bearing of the closing course of the boundary.  Instead of something like 700 feet, one would need to calculate the circumference off Earth and subtract something like 700 feet.  This is probably why I am so anal about insisting on the bearing of a line on the survey drawing agrees with the bearing of the boundary course in the description.  I have found that error too many times on surveys where the first couse is from a POC to a POB to account for a right of way taken in fee.  The tract is along the east ROW line being somethng like 100 feet from the west section line.  The description reads like  "Thence North 89 degrees 49 minutes 12 seconds West, 100.12 feet to the East ROW line of""