Are you the engineer and the drafter? 3

[upjengnr04]

For those of you who work as a one man team or for very small firms (in particular structural guys/gals), do you perform CAD drafting for your work or do you sub that out? Or maybe you don't use CAD at all?

Just curious as to your approach. I have previously worked for a large firm and had dedicated drafters for our projects. There were not many opportunities to learn CAD as it relates to project documents so there was a lot of "on your own" learning that had to be done if you wanted to learn.

Thanks.

 

[AELLC]

Drafting involves making so many mouse and k/b operations for every friggin line, and requires memorizing so many commands and knowledge about how best to layer objects, etc (so you really can't draft efficiently unless you do it full time)....it makes zero sense for engrs to draft.

However it is necessary to know how to make slight revisions and to print or plot.

 

[SLTA]

I know enough CAD to be dangerous. Honestly, though, I can hand-draft so much faster than I can draft on CAD, that I usually just use it to measure or plot. My work rarely needs electronic files, and if it does, I give all my info to the architect and let them do the drafting!

I think it's worth knowing at least the basics. Our local community college has CAD classes, cheap and at night. DraftSight is a great 2D program, and best of all, it's FREE. There's a whole forum on here for it.

Good luck!

Oh and hey - thanks for the recognition that we're not all guys. It's appreciated.

 

[IRstuff]

I don't know about structural, per se, but MEs and EEs in my company do all their own CAD; we have no drafters at all. One particular issue is where various subsystems have to fit into an assembly; having to tell someone to "fix this, fix that" and then find hours later that it's still not fixed is bad. Most drafters don't have sufficient knowledge to do the engineering of a part that is wrong or doesn't fit. In the old days, sending the drafter off to do CAD allowed the engineer to think, but not having the actual and latest design in front of you is bound to decrease your productivity on that end.

TTFN
faq731-376

Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529

 

[zdas04]

Last year I got a great reminder of why I do my own CAD. I had a project that the client wanted another Engineering company to do document control and the drawings I had done didn't match their document control format. I sent all of my non-compliant drawings to their drafting department to be "fixed". Everyone thought that they would just grab the model and copy it into a compliant layout space (AutoCAD). These "professional draftsmen" did not know what the layout space was for and put all their headers and dimensions on my model space. That wasn't horrible, but it cost $80k for them to "fix" drawings that I had done for $18k. Then I started on the red line to get the conversions back to the functions I originally drew. Add a valve back in? 3 days, 2 draftsmen and a supervisor, $5k. Doesn't matter that the reason the valve is not there is that their draftsman deleted it because he couldn't see why it was there--he was "helping". At the end of the day these guys started with a set of drawings that I would have been happy to build the job from and turned them into a mess that I will always be nervous about for $200k (not to mention $25k of my time in the re-re-re-re-red-line process).

It is a lot more cost effective to go from the Engineer's mind straight to CAD than to try to shove your ideas through the biases of a third party.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[SteelPE]

I sub my drafting out to others. I know enough to make the necessary changes to the drawings when they come in. I have so many clients that want drawings in 2 weeks an then delay in getting me a contract for a week but still want the project on the same date. Rarely I will attempt to draft a project. Usually if the project is small and there just isn't enough money in the project to have someone else to do the work.

I know this is odd for many structural engineering companies. I know a lot of companies where the engineers do their own drafting. I interviewed at a company where they want me to do my own drafting. I agreed but in the end they ended up going in a different direction and I have been working for myself ever since.

 

[AELLC]

Interesting-

I think if the work involves detail-oriented fitting together of components that non-engineering drafters don't understand then the Engineer obviously should do the drafting.

In my line of work (building and residential structural), it seems to be the opposite.

 

[AELLC]

SteelPE,

Back when drafting was done with pencil and eraser and paper, emphasis on eraser, drafting was never done by the Engineer...in fact as an employee, I was told it was prohibited by Company rules.

Oh yes I have done a few tiny jobs recently by pencil and paper, that was quicker than CAD for me.

 

[IRstuff]

One reason I didn't apply to one particular company was that the engineers (EEs) weren't allowed to use the oscilloscopes in the lab; they had to be operated by technicians, and the engineers would be standing over their shoulders and ask the technician to "poke here", "now there", "no, not there." This is after 3 yrs of doing my own poking and in control of my destiny, and I couldn't even being to imagine how to direct someone else to do that poking.

TTFN
faq731-376

Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529

 

[mtu1972]

I'm enjoying these discussions. Back in 1969 MTU revised the 'mechanical drafting class' to 'Engineering Communications' because "Engineers no longer do drafting".

My first duties in my first engineering job at a small consulting firm was to draft precast concrete shop drawings. Having only had 2 semesters of drafting in high school, primarily related to our wood shop projects, my productivity After the first week, they made me a "checker" so that I could learn how I should have been doing the drafting.

In my second job with a heavy industrial design-build contractor, the engineers were often made to draft on Saturday as our overtime was billed at straight time and the drafter's were billed at time and a half. Only when clients agreed to pay the added charges were the drafters scheduled for overtime. I know; the fact that we billed that time at a higher rate seemed ridiculous as the overhead fixed costs were based on a 40 hour work week. And the engineer's rates and efficiency probably ended up costing more in the long run.

In the other 5 jobs I had after that, I drafted at all but one place. They had a rule about Engineers not drafting, and it took a special request to even get CAD on my computer so as to be able to access drawings that were being worked on in our other offices without having to bother the one structural drafter in the office I worked in. They made my CAD seat Read Only.

I don't profess to being a proficient CAD drafter, but at the end of projects when all that is left is picking up red marks, everyone was expected to help get the drawings out.

gjc

 

[mtu1972]

. . . my productivity sucked. After . . .

gjc

 

[KENAT]

You didn't know how to draft so they got you to check other peoples drawings to see if they'd been drawn properly? Am I the only one that sees the deliberate flaw to this plan?

Different field(s) but I've been doing my own drafting my whole career. Occasionally get to delegate something which by the time I mark up the drawing, they make the requested changes + add a new mistake or two (repeat ad infinitum) usually takes longer.

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[AELLC]

"I don't profess to being a proficient CAD drafter, but at the end of projects when all that is left is picking up red marks, everyone was expected to help get the drawings out."

Now I remember why I don't like to draw my own engineering - it must be psychological conditioning.

Back in pencil and paper days, when engineers were prohibited to draft, we engrs all elbows and a******* at drafting tables at 3:00AM in the morning with the drafting staff trying to meet the deadline, and there were no managers or bosses to see what was going on.

Plus, the drafters were earning 1.5 x hourly rate and we engineers were earning $zero$, being salaried professionals.

 

[GerryBertier]

I draft and engineer my projects.

I produce my CDs with Revit. As a young engineer with 5 years experience, my jobs are much more efficiently delivered as one person per job if possible. I don't have to block out details for a drafter. I don't have to hand sketch details for a drafter. I put the buildings together, to scale, once. I learn how things will fit. I think about constructibility. I can easily transfer my drafting views in Revit from job to job when they are similar and revise accordingly. I see arch'l changes to the building daily and when walls have moved. Instead of making presentation a two step process, I make it one.

If you are not efficient with CAD or Revit, I could understand why you wouldn't want to draft, but with my generation, we started in CAD. I can bust out a detail in Revit as fast as I can draft by hand. While that's partly due to my struggles with sketching, I'd put myself up against any engineer along with his drafter and see who can be more efficient.

 

[AELLC]

Gerry,

Yes, I see more and more engineers doing drafting 100% or supplementing the drafting staff, but I still don't understand how you can "gird" yourselves to do your engineering job 100% dedicated, with the additional chore of having to draft.

The above would not apply if you are a one-person shop and your drafting hours are billable, and you have that motivation.

I don't understand, if, on the other hand, you were an employee and had to put in substantial non-compensated hours.

 

[AELLC]

I was thinking more about the different scenarios. Gerry on one hand presents logical argument in favor of drafting, and I was analyzing why the opposite was true for me.

Then I got to wondering, what if I was young and CAD-proficient? It still would be a problem, because the people who draft off my redlines work are in-house employees of my client, and they take at least twice the time to draw a project as I do to engineer it, and they are absolute proficient in their efforts. In other words, if I did my own drafting and my client's drafters did only their company's archi drafting, I would have time to produce only half the jobs, and would have to bill at 2-3 times my current rate. Overall, it would probably be a wash because the client would probably have to lay off a drafter.

I think that as a one-man shop, it still makes more sense for me to do engrg only.

So the "answer" to the OP is highly dependent on the situation.

 

[JohnRBaker]

I come from the mechanical side where I've been involved with industries referred to 'discrete manufacturing' meaning that you produced things that were machines that made things (I worked 14 year where we built capital machinery for the food and chemical industries) or that you could drive or fly or operate or that you could pick-up and carry. In other words, we didn't engineer buildings, highways, process plants, etc. In my 47 year of engineering, 14 years in R&D and 33 years working for a CAD vendor, at least in our industries, Engineers and designers did their own work first on the boards and later using CAD and even when there were dedicated 'drafters' the original layouts and now 3D CAD models were alwasys the responsibility of the designers and Engineers. And where there were no 'drafters' you did your own Drawings (in my 14 years of real-world work, I'd been in both situations where I've had drafters working for me and other times I did that work myself, but when I started to use CAD, I never used a dedicated drafter again).

Now, at least in our industry (and I use that term with respect to the customers who are using our software), the trend is to move away from fully dimensioned and annotated, 2D Drawings with orthographic projected views and toward what is known as PMI, for 'Product and Manufacturing Information', which is added directly to the 3D CAD models and which provides the means to convey the non-geometric information about a part or product to the downstream organizations as 3D viewable models (not necessarily the original CAD model but a lightweight 3D representation which now represents the electronic document or specification). Of course any operations such as analysis and manufacturing would be done using the actual CAD models but for many people in an organization a 3D lightweight representation that they can view and manipulate on a computer screen is all they really need along with access to any documents associated with a part file or assembly model as is provide by modern PDM, or 'Product Data Management', systems. Al of these systems, the CAD, CAE, CAM and PDM, makes up what is now referred to as PLM, or 'Product Lifecyle Management'.

For an overview of PLM, please go to:

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/plm/index.shtml

And for a look at PMI, which is more on topic for this thread and the questions originally asked, at least as we're seeing it evolve in the 'discrete manufacturing' sectors, please go to:

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.c...ion (PMI) - NX Fact Sheet - 9645&docType=.pdf

Now for some off-topic discussion:

mtu1972, does that 'MTU' stand for Michigan Tech (AKA da Tech)? If so, I graduated from MTU in 1971 with a BSME. And yes I to had to take something like that 'Engineering Communications' class, which included such things a working with collateral materials like overhead slides, hand sketching illustrations, flip-charts and posters and doing stand-up presentations (which were video taped and which were later 'peer reviewed'), etc. Looking back on my 6 years at the 'da Tech (I changed majors) I think that particular class was perhaps one of the most valuable (along with the one semester of typing I had back in high school) when you consider how, at least in my case, the workplace has evolved. And for the record, I never had a formal 'drafting' class, either in high school or college, just one term of something called 'Engineering Graphics' where you learned, among other things, how to draw ellipses, calculate the true length of a line, draw a two and three point perspective image, etc. but nothing that would be recognized as traditional mechanical drawing. However, I did co-op for 4 years working as a Draftsman so what I did learn was all OJT, and since I eventually went to work for the same company when I graduated, at least I had been 'trained' to do it their way and not how it was done in some textbook ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[xnuke]

I both draft and engineer simultaneously. I don't think I can ever go back to the back-and-forth required when working with a drafter. The product I use for control panel design allows me to select parts on the fly from manufacturer's catalogs, has intelligent icons (for example, parent-child relationships for coils and contacts and checks to see if contact quantities are exceeded), a lot of pre-made PLC I/O diagrams, can produce BOMs, autonumber components and wires, check for unconnected wires, do panel layouts with included device footprints, etc. I can now design a custom control panel in about 1/4 the time it used to take me going back and forth with a drafter and the end result is more accurate.



xnuke
"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life." Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[mtu1972]

Kenat - I'm sure they did it as a training element for me. The Sr. Drafter and the boss probably both looked at every drawing I reviewed.

JohnRBaker - Yes Mich Tech. BSCE in 1972. One of the 3 Civils (out of 105) that took the Structures option.


I did some hand drafting, early on, and then was given formal training when transitioning into CAD (late '80's). Some small projects were engineered and drafted by the engineers, but any larger project had CAD Designers assigned to better coordinate our Civil/Structural/Architectural drawings with the other disciplines (Mechanical and Electrical) and to help maintain the project schedules.

We were just transitioning into Revit when I retired so I never got any real insight as to the inner workings.

gjc

 

[JedClampett]

We have a full compliment of CAD monkeys (I'm being too kind). So our company's policy is to have engineers engineer and CAD people do the final presentation. There is some friction, as some of the engineers (mostly electrical) want to do their own CAD work, so when we changed CAD platforms, they didn't give it to the engineers. Problem solved!
When I started some of the engineers wanted to do their own CAD work. After observing, I noted three problems with that:
1) The obvious extra responsibilities of having to engineer the project, do the calculations, specifications and then do the drawings. All at the engineers rate.
2) The drawings always eventually get handed off to CAD for assembly and final touch up. And since an engineer had done the work, the CAD staff takes a hands off approach and won't fix any obvious presentation items, like line weights. It's their little way of protesting. So the drawings don't have a consistent look.
3) The engineers can't possibly keep up with client standards, updates, etc.