Are engineers naturally able to know when to make changes at the worst possible time or are they trained in it? What I mean is, "little" changes that blow everything apart! Can I move that line? Yup, but it'l mean I need to change the hatch, the quantities, the station notes and, and, and! I'm also being told to not worry too much about fine adjustments as it's preliminary, however this must be at this grade and that last minute we decided to raise the surface about 3 feet, instead of following natural drainage!
Sorry, just frustrated at these silly little changes that added up take hours to make, and should have been requested well before the proposal was near completion.:pissed:
welcome to the world of Engineering Designs.
I had a guy come out with a change in the water line, and when we got the new CAD file from him he had also decided to move a building five feet without telling anyone...Because it looked better lined up with the center of a road headed toward it. A BUILDING....FOR A WATER LINE REVISION
I had a new building to merge into an existing building. Until a few walls came down the new addition couldn't be precisely located on the ground.
Once it was it made the parking lot in front a bit out of parallel. The enginerd wanted to roated it, and the road, and the next parking lot to the north, and all the light poles, sewer, water, catch basins, ect. I said why would we do all that? Because the grounds keeper thought it would look better to have everything "line-up".
Me and the super talked them out of doing that. No one is going to notice that the building and the parking lot are 7 minutes out of parallel.
I think it's even more fun when they start moving buildings as you're doing the layout. Always with the comment of "It's a minor revision, just make it match in the field"
lol, it looked terrible when he was zoomed in.
I wish I could get the field option, however with DOT managing some projects it isn't meant to be. The oft heard one I get is "can you move that line a little". After having calmed down I returned to work and finished up the revisions, just earthwork on one 3/4 mile section the volume increased approximately 40%! Oh well, I also learned how to target a feature line (trail was to go up at 2% from back of existing curb).
It's nice to know I'm not alone in my frustration, but dang if it still sucks....yay for OT!
the 40% increase in exc. sounds like you may have left minor revision country and wandered into change order land.... how many yards are you actually talking about?
Roughly, about an additional 2,000 Cu.Yds, overall on one alignment there is close to 4,000 Cu.Yds of fill (filling something along the lines of a small ravine). Luckily this is still in the conceptual phase, however it is no less frustrating.
seven minutes?! They do line up.
They are making you chase way too much detail to be in conceptual phase.
Just let the engineers make approximate guesses in conceptual phase since they don't know how to get the real numbers.
You can do the real drawings, alignments, surfaces and quantities during final design.
Looks like they have you by the tail right now!
Remember "bum wad"?
Get some of that out and have them do the conceptuals.
I am with you on the frustration and the OT, but I am not with them on the budget!
They are killing it.
And BOOM goes the budget!