About Units

Hi everyone,

Does anybody know what happened and how to fix this problem? The problem is I had a drawing and I think it's from architectural firm. Someone scaled the drawing down from 12 units to 1 units. I checked the units and it said "Unitless", but when I inserted brand new block scale 1=1, the block was way too big (it looked 12 time bigger than it should be). I had this problem only when the drawing was scaled down. If the drawing was drawn at true scale from the start I won't have this problem with my block. Thank you.

It sounds like your correct, it has been scaled. The easy fix is for you to just scale it up 12 times. My question is are you absolutely sure 12 is the factor? I would find something on the drawing you can measure with the distance command and verify for sure. If its a ARCH drawing, find a standard doorframe and see if it is 3 or 36 inches wide.

As for drawing at true scale, what is true scale? Life size in feet and inches or millimeters? I ask because different industries use different units or forms of units as the accepted standard. The civil industry uses feet as the standard, with decimal feet representing the inches you and I expect as a standard. The reason is because they are usually dealing with very large amounts of land that simplely wont fit on a sheet using the traditional ARCH scales, ie 1/8" or 1/16".

I'm in engineering firm doing street improvement such as striping, which should show the lane width of 12' or 11' or 10', etc. Somehow the drawing I have problem with was drawn 12 times bigger. I checked the block scale and it showed 0.0833. Every block I insert need to be in that scale. Why is that?

a 12 times scale factor suggest to me that one of you is draing in inches, the other feet.

Dave, I know that. I just want to know how to fix it so next time I insert the block I don't have to use 0.08333 for the block scale.

It sounds like the units dialog box needs fixing. Type in units and see what it says

look at the INSUNITS variable. It will force the inserted block to use a different unit system

I check both places and it said unitless, which is what I want it to be.

It might be possible that the inserted block has a scale factor inside the block definition. If you open the block your inserting, and open the block editor, what does the properties page look like?

I check both places and it said unitless, which is what I want it to be.

I prefer unitless but AutoCAD now makes assumptions as you have already seen. However because of these assumptions I am beginning to declare the block unit.

Look at the variables in the INS* area and you can set these to force your inserted block to be feet, inches, or whatever.

I check the block that I created and it has unitless also. I have problem with AutoCAD2009 if the drawing is unitless and the block is in inches. that's why I use unitless to create the block. You know what I might block the whole thing out and bring it in again, kinda like start fresh. I hope my theory is working. thank you so much for all your advice.

Just an idea but if the drawing was complete and sent to you is there not a template with a scale on it in paper space?

Nellie, I don't know what you're talking about. Anyway, if the drawing originally set the units to be FEET, what can I do to make it unitless. I can change the units at dialog box, but it won't affect anything. After I inserted the block, which its text height = 0.1, the text height will equal 1.2 instead of 0.1.

When we send drawings to a client we always (unless asked not to) send the drawing with a template which has the clients name, Scale Address etc on it.

This is in paper space, just above the comand line there is a tab called model and one or two called layout 1 or something like that (this is called paper space)

Regards

nope, I didn't get it. I thought the template is the one when you open AutoCAD, and Autocad will search (according to the path) and open the template that you set up. Then you get the blank Drawing1.