more of the same rant about drawing standards 2

[duk748]

hello again - sorry to bring this same old beat the dead horse subject to the table again but i just have to rant considering i am getting nowhere w/ the people i work with -
how can one engineering group be so blind as to drink the kool aid & believe everything that a cad package tells them - i have just finished checking a set of drawings done by
an m.e. w/ a masters degree no less that look like something a high school kid would do (that may be an insult to the h.s. kid) - who uses 1:3 scale on a metric drawing?
who balloons a washer 1 time in 1 view on the drawing & shows the qty. below as 100x? - (good luck finding the rest of them poor assembly person) - who uses a 21.8 dia. counterbore for an
m12 bolt because the software "does it that way"? - have we become so complacent that we throw out what we have been taught & just let the software do it's thing because the software
"cant be wrong"? - standards that have been written by someone who knows nothing about "standards"? - i think it may be time to throw in the towel here & start looking for a better place to
make a living - we also recently had a sub contractor take a model from us for a very large gas & oil piping rig to manufacture the piping runs which in turn we would install in the rig -
the person who made the model used the wrong wall thickness on the pipe in the model "because thats what the software told him to use" - now we are stuck w/ $$$$ of useless pipe -
please accept my apology for the rant but i just dont get it anymore - thank you & have a great day

 

[swertel]

Good luck and my condolences.


--Scott
www.aerornd.com

 

[3DDave]

I stopped caring about scales of drawings when companies started printing all the C and D size drawings on B size laser printers and then complaining that C size doesn't fill the page. The underlying unit of Postscript and PDF is 1/72 of an inch so any further scaling is built from that.

Sucks about the pipe - anyone checking anyone's work? Checkers are often the first to go, followed by complaints that the engineers should just sort out being consistent, in their spare time, apparently.

 

[drawoh]

duk748,

At my new job, I no longer have a large format printer, and we are discouraged from printing. We all have laptops we can carry around.

I have not brought in my old triangular scales. I love the old English ones that do 1:1, 1:2, 1:3, 1:4, 1:5 and 1:6[ ]scale. You have to search carefully for metric ones. The standard is 1:1, 1:2, 1:5, 1:10, 1:20 and 1:50[ ]scale. This is the perfect thing for engineers who do not know how to multiply and divide by ten. I don't have my good metric scale here. I think it goes 1:1, 1:2, 1:2.5, 1:3, 1:4 and 1:5[ ]scale. There is nothing wrong with 1:3[ ]scale as far as I am concerned. I have the scale for it!

In what way were your piping thicknesses wrong? The American standard has multiple thicknesses for each inch pipe size, noted by schedules. Did he pick the wrong one, or did he model some unavailable non-standard size?



--
JHG

 

[drawoh]

duk748,

Quantities on item balloons are an interesting problem. I was manually entering the quantity on each call-up of fasteners. All SolidWorks can do is show the total quantity. People complained that managing quantities was too much work.

Good drafting is like good writing. You are trying to communicate with people, and you need to organize your drawing for clarity. Too many CAD monkeys execute their Generate Drawing procedure, and ignore the eventual user.

Does your company have formal standards?

--
JHG

 

[mkcski]

Good drafting is like good writing. You are trying to communicate with people, and you need to organize your drawing for clarity. Too many CAD monkeys execute their Generate Drawing procedure, and ignore the eventual user.

drawoh - great analogy!!!!!! - The audience really matters. "Writing" drawings assumes persons went to school to read them. As we all know, many times this not the case.

Do you mind if I spread this around my shop when the need arises?

Certified Sr. GD&T Professional

 

[ctopher]

Most new grads these days don't know anything about standards, they are not taught.
For scale, I never call it out on drawings. A lot of companies do not use plotters anymore. If they do, drawings are saved as PDF and printed on small printers; which are not scaled properly. Scaling on drawings do not help you any more, just put "NONE".

Chris, CSWP
SolidWorks '17
ctophers home
SolidWorks Legion

 

[drawoh]

mkcski,

Go ahead.

--
JHG

 

[duk748]

hello again & thank you for the replies - the pipes were modeled w/ some odd wall thickness - not sure if it was o.e. or he did not know until it was too late & let it go (we have a lot of that
happening around here anymore too) - the scale thing maybe just a pet peeve for i always thought that metric scales were a multiple of 10 hence 1:3 just seemed odd - like someone trying to scale a view to fit the paper - drawoh hit it right on - i encountered the same complaining from our people too - we have a standard but it was written by someone who i really do not believe has any knowledge of ansi or anything else - if you read it it is a heinz 57 of standards which i have a problem w/ also - i was told recently too that my g.e. drafting manual was "too old" to follow anymore & my reply was
"good drafting & drawing skills never go out of style" - sometimes i think i should have never taken up this trade - thanks again for your support (now i sound like bartles & james - really showing my age!!)

 

[TWJR]

All SolidWorks can do is show the total quantity.

That's one of my biggest pet peeves about Solidworks. As former Pro/E user who certainly likes the Solidworks UI better, I sure wish they would have the smart balloon quantity management that Pro/E does. It's great. Never have to worry about the total being off, despite how many times you split off a partial quantity.

 

[CWB1]

1:3 is a common metric scale, I've got several prints on my desk currently from different suppliers using it and cant see a reason not to.

"Trusting the software" is only as good as the CAD manager, sounds like yours needs to do their job. Personally I wouldn't hesitate to use the default counterbores, pipe/stock sizes, or anything else in an available library nor would I spend much effort checking them as I know our CAD manager has done his job to ensure they match engineering standards.

Many engineers have never drafted a print nor will many ever have need to bc they work with talented draftsmen. Most of my drafting since leaving the trades and becoming an engineer has been on an emergency-only basis and I'll be the first to admit my limitations/inexperience when laying out multi-page complex prints. Without knowing more about someone's training or experience its difficult to pass judgment, but personally I'm very much against those companies who expect their engineers to act as draftsmen due to the complexity of many parts I've designed.

 

[Tunalover]

God help me but I think I'm on the brink of working a two-year contract gig in a huge defense R&D lab full of PhDs of all flavors where most have huge egos but no drafting or engineering skills to match. I just hope they don't assign one that tries to tell me how to engineer and draw. If the guy doesn't listen and quickly realize that I know more than he does about these things, then they might get me on a Murder 1 charge in short order!


H. Bruce Jackson
ElectroMechanical Product Development
UMD 1984
UCF 1993

 

[3DDave]

TL - just remember, suffering builds character.

(edited for better cartoon)