Civil Engineering Drafting Reference Books 1

[jpistos]

Does anyone know a good refernece book that can be used to help edumacate our new drafter on how to show basic civil drafting stuff like curbs, plan/profiles, inlets, paving, etc. I'm doing alot of very detailed redline drawing and he's doing alot of tracing....does this sound familier?

 

[gbam]

Jpistos,
I have encountered similar situations. I have not found any ref. that shows what you want. But, what I have done to rectify the drafting issue is to have the drafters draw exactly what is being designed. This includes culture and such. For instance, the curb is shown as face of curb top of curb and back of curb. Now depending on final plotted scale the top of curb is sometimes omitted. Typically, we show everything first then redline the data that seems too cluttered. To differentiate from existing to new, we use line types and weights. This has worked really well for many years. Just a suggestion.

 

[Qshake]

It's not a stretch to have new cad techs draw old ink drawings to become familar with the material. Of course, this takes them out of production for a while, but it can assit greatly with learning. Once they have mastered this material and asked all the appropriate questions they are quite a benefit to the group.

Regards,
Qshake

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[DwattedWabbit]

I hope your new drafter is at least familiar with CAD drafting, and using offsets and O-snap commands to get parallel linework and so forth. If your new drafter is brand-new to drafting in general, it's going to be a long trail to proficient CAD drafting, no matter the branch of engineering.

(Our office has a consistent problem in receiving CAD drawings - from architects in particular - for building footprints which have lines going every which-way, as if the CAD drafter or architect never heard of the concepts of parallel and perpendicular. Another thing they consistently do, insisting that they are being helpful, is putting all the linework, symbols, texts, etc., all onto one layer, called "NONE" or some such thing. Why they think this is helpful to us is beyond my comprehension. I don't understand what the point is of using CAD drafting if you don't understand the tools.)

If your new drafter is a skilled CAD drafter but is new to your field, giving him or her some samples of plans of recent projects from your office should help bring him or her along quickly.

I hope you have an in-house library of blocks for commonly used items, like inlets, end-sections, manholes and such, with separate blocks for both existing and proposed. We've found that if these blocks are created with a node at a common insertion point and are created on layer "0", they are easily inserted and are easily changed to the appropriate layer. All of the items in one of these blocks should also have their linetypes to be "bylayer" and colors "bylayer", so they will be subject to layer conditions when assigned in the project drawing.

A notebook with a hard copy of legends, common notes, abbreviations, linework, linetypes, symbols, base sheet templates, etc., used and approved by your company, should be developed (if you haven't done so already) and should be photocopied and handed out to every new employee who may do any amount of CAD drafting. It seems time-consuming, but it won't take any more time than the time it takes to train a new CAD drafter to draft plans the way your company wants them.

Of course, the AIA and other national groups have books of standards available, and your state agencies (DOT, for example) should have standards available that they require for plans drawn up for submission to them. Many linetypes and symbols are commonly used by most companies, for ready recognition between fields and agencies.

Good luck!

 

[jpistos]

Thanks for the input. Roger that on the architect dwgs, they usually make our senior drafter cuss like a drunken sailor (snapping to alleged "intersecting lines"? surprise -they don't intersect!!!). We have a notebook, but it needs updating, I will make that my highest priority, second only to the current projects on hand! We also have a new, new drafter that's much better than than the one that was making ME cuss like a drunken sailor....