Imperial Drawings

We are having trouble setting up a drawing in Feet & inches.

Up until now all we have been drawing in metric

Can anyone help

Start by using an imperial based drawing template file. The generic one would be acad.dwt. Set your Units to Architectural and your precision to either 1/8" or 1/16". Direct distance entry would take the form of 10'8" (not 10'-8") and 6'7-1/2" (not 6'-7 1/2"). Got it?

Start by using an imperial based drawing template file. The generic one would be acad.dwt. Set your Units to Architectural and your precision to either 1/8" or 1/16". Direct distance entry would take the form of 10'8" (not 10'-8") and 6'7-1/2" (not 6'-7 1/2"). Got it?

Either of those can be used. 10' 8" (with a space) will not work as the space is ENTER. Also the " is not needed to indicate inches. So 10'-8" can be entered as 10'-8", 10'-8, 10'8", 10'8, 128" or 128.

Some more info required. Are you wanting to convert existing metric drawings into imperial?

If so then I'd first start with a blank drawing from the acad.dwt template, ensure the InsUnits in the original is set correctly (e.g. 4=millimetres, 1=inches) - use the Units command to check / change this. Then insert & explode it into the new blank DWG - it should get scaled automatically.

After that you may need to reload your linetypes from the acad.lin file instead of the acadiso.lin. If they were loaded from the acad.lin and you used some weird LtScale to compensate, then you should just adjust the LtScale to something like 1.0.

Hatches is a different matter, they should appear correct. But as soon as you edit one or match properties between two you'll find them growing huge. Unfortunately you'll need to look out for this and adjust the hatch scale if and when you see a problem.

Next you'll need to adjust your styles (text, mleaders, dims, etc.). Usually you'd apply a factor of 1/25.4 = 0.03937 to all the lengths, heights & scale factors.

Then if you use Annotative Scaling, you'll need to assign new imperial scales to replace the metric scales.

Lastly you'd need to setup your layouts with a scaled version of your titleblock (again the 1/25.4 factor) - also adjusting the PageSetup to now use inches instead of mm.

Thanks Irneb for this

Glad to help