I'm not a CAD user, but it seems to me that it should offer a line that will only terminate on pre-existing points. No missed snapping.
Then that line should know it's length and not need any help beyond positioning the label. Don't they have that?
Loyal, post: 453495, member: 228 wrote: How about this one?
Loyal
decimal minutes???
Dan Patterson, post: 453596, member: 1179 wrote: decimal minutes???
Yup!
Loyal
lmbrls, post: 453414, member: 6823 wrote: I review plats from several states and have found that about 25% of the time the plat does not close. I don't mean a small error because of a flipped bearing, rounding or even unadjusted field error. I mean distances of several feet that were inadvertently left off the survey or bearing and distance that are just wrong. Many times the survey will appear professional and very detailed. They just don't close. I am not wanting the survey to have problems, so I can pat myself on the back. I actually want the survey to close. It pains me to see in many cases apparently much effort put into a survey to see it fall short because of the omission of a simple procedure. The error is so apparent that it is rare I can't determine where it is with very little effort. I was taught that a survey never leaves the office or is signed until a map check is performed. This is entering the bearing and distances taken from the hard copy of the survey. An area summary of the graphical file is not a map check. When I was in private practice, I had several technicians tell me that my old school approach was no longer necessary with the new software. The ones who learned the error of their ways had continued employment. Sorry for the rant. This is so basic and unnecessary.
Apparently the surveyors you work with haven't learned the "North Arrow Rule" of dealing with map checkers. I??ve checked a lot of maps and I have to admit that this worked on me every time: Just leave off the north arrow and the map checker will get so excited he won't see anything else.
Don
Don Blameuser, post: 453611, member: 30 wrote: Apparently the surveyors you work with haven't learned the "North Arrow Rule" of dealing with map checkers. I??ve checked a lot of maps and I have to admit that this worked on me every time: Just leave off the north arrow and the map checker will get so excited he won't see anything else.
Don
Here its the graphical scale. Years ago the FS here tried to record a drawing of an entire section. Depicting it on one sheet required a scale that was out of the range required by State statutes, so the Recorder would not accept it. The drafter changed the scale from feet to chains and it was recorded without hesitation!
Even when I did most of my surveys with a total station, there weren't many (any?) that I ever was able to run direct along the boundary, so reporting "measurements" from one monument to the next doesn't make much sense to me. Most (and by most I mean the exceedingly vast majority) of my calls are inverses between coordinates determined from measurements. They should close precisely.
I can only think of a couple of times in my career that I did not run the calls through a calculator program I wrote to check for closure and acreage. This includes lots in a subdivision. There have been a few times that I've found that I missed labeling a call (particularly in subdivision plats) that needed to be added.
Regarding CAD labels, one thing I have to be very careful of is turning off lines that are near the boundary when annotating. Fences are the worst. Sometimes the fence is drawn monument to monument (close enough to call them the same), but sometimes I have fence lines that are near the boundary but are not the same, this can get you into trouble quickly.
There are also a lot of people trimming boundary lines at their symbols to make hollow symbols. This isn't necessary with modern CAD symbols and is a bad idea anyway. Way too much chance of annotating a trimmed line instead of the real line.
I'd say that sending out a survey that doesn't close would have to be one of the most embarrassing things a surveyor could do, simply because it is avoidable and easily detected by related professionals with cheap software. Yikes.
Back in the day, I used to punch in from the plan for lot closures, and it's still a good habit. But I found that I'm good with a lot summary print-out, and then checking it against the plan. Someone showed me long ago to green-line what's good and red-line what's bad, and I think that it's been working pretty good for me.
Since most of the B-D come from the computer, you get far less of the mixed up bearings, NW instead of NE, than we did when everything was hand drafted.
Monte, post: 453576, member: 11913 wrote: Always draw your lines from point number to point number, and always do your annotations from point number to point number, then do your map check from point number to point number. Picking lines has always been where we find our mis-closures around here.
BOOM!
This is exactly right or at least how I do it.
The goal of the survey plat and property description is to help someone find the monuments on the ground. Is adjustment going to change the reported bearings and distances so much as to affect the retracement of the boundary on the ground? Sounds like there are some pretty poor measurements then.
Dave Karoly, post: 453628, member: 94 wrote: BOOM!
This is exactly right or at least how I do it.
Point numbers? You obviously pre-date the CAD generation. So do I
Andy Nold, post: 453647, member: 7 wrote: The goal of the survey plat and property description is to help someone find the monuments on the ground. Is adjustment going to change the reported bearings and distances so much as to affect the retracement of the boundary on the ground? Sounds like there are some pretty poor measurements then.
Agreed - the ability to "adjust" measurements is a task well-suited to the "expert measurer" rather than the true boundary surveyor.
Maybe I'm wrong but to me a "Map Check" is NOT taken from the electronic drawing. I always took a hard copy and punched in the bearings and distances. No matter how good you are at picking lines (or nodes, or polylines, or whatever) the written numbers are what you should be checking.
Andy
The first subdivision I drew in Cad in 1988, I labeled lines by snapping to the endpoints of the lines ... of the square symbols for the concrete bounds. Fortunately it was caught before filing.
Most of the surveys here I can tell if the lots will close by the title block. It's about 50/50. And if lines drawn in cad don't quite meet it's a good tell. Most of XXX's surveys are like that.
Checking your own work is tough. Before submitting a survey, I write the legal description, print it and use the printed description to re-create every parcel on a new layer, outside the margins of the drawing, to make sure it closes. It takes some time, but I catch a lot of my mistakes, and I like to think not much gets by.
The obvious lack of Quality Control concerns me more than the method to obtain the results. If it closes, it closes. I personally need to run a Map Check like Andy described above to be sure. I also run them independently on Legal Descriptions. Sometimes the Plats I review will have one error and the Description will have another.
I do all I can to assure my line work runs through corner points, and run a map check calculating area. Then after writing the description I run it through a program named Deed Plotter. It gives area and closure. It will write a dxf file that can be referenced in a cad drawing.
