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Dimensions taken from full scale drawing and transferred to a representative sketch


Mijjlee

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I work for a prestressed concrete beam company and recently my team has been faced with the problem of drawing beams at full scale and incorrectly transferring the dimensions to a sketch that we use to represent all I-beams. Since I-beams can be extremely long, we use a drawing of an I-beam in plan and elevation view to represent all beam lengths. We use this sketch so that we can fit the shop drawing on B size paper. Once the full scale has been drawn in model space, we want to find a way to fill in the dimension strings on the sketch that will be used in paper space. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there a way to link the full scale drawing and have it populate the sketch correctly. Currently my team has just been overriding the dimensions in the sketch and human error can be very costly. My team and I would greatly appreciate any help or suggestions :) THANK YOU ALL IN ADVANCE!!!!!!

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Welcome to CADTutor Mijjlee. :)

 

You will get lots of good feedback on how best to approach this, lots of different ways to do it.

I do steel detailing for major projects and we use the ProSteel (by Bentley) addon for Autocad.

That is the steel detailing portion of ProStructures, which includes very extensive functionality for Concrete.

It does all of the detail drawings automatically, and sizes everything to fit on whatever size sheet you choose.

 

On the attached .dwg file you will see examples of the Shorting of nonessential bits (indicated by break lines) in long lengths of material, where the only detail would be Length. In this way very long elements can fit onto a smaller sheet, but still with a scale of say 10:1. That would be similar to what you describe in your original post.

 

Once the 3D Model is complete, you just aim it at a specific sheet (template) which includes the title block and pull the trigger.

It can spit out 1000 drawings in about 5 minutes with no human interaction.

I used to be responsible for drawing them, now I just check whatever the software has output, to make sure there are no missing dimensions or other such issues.

Strange as it sounds, I miss the good old days when I would frequently work 16 hour days, for weeks on end.

I think my drawings looked better than the new ones, but the steel fabricator in China loves that there are never any mistakes, even if they are not as pretty as my old drawings.

The drawings include BOMs and all kinds of other stuff.

I think they also have a ProConcrete addon.

 

Autodesk does have Structural Detailing, which does lots of the same stuff, not sure if it creates the drawings though, which is a huge part of the appeal of ProSteel.

Autodesk licenses some of the Bentley tools, and has used them in their own products.

I think there is another new Autodesk one, with which I have no experience.

Edited by Dadgad
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ReMark,

 

Can I send you a .dwg file of the template we use? I'm not very familiar with annotative scaling because this template was in place when I started working for this company. We are trying to revamp our drawings to make them smarter and work for us and not against us. This topic is #1 on the list.

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Are you at least familiar with layouts and viewports? One does not necessarily have to use annotative dimensions in model space. For example, we happen to do all of our dimensioning in the layout as not to clutter up model space.

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Dadgad the "Shorting of nonessential bits " is a good idea but reflect true length. Interesting concept draw full size and then chop and join.

 

Yes, it is, you can specify in your saved settings, what is the minimum length to be shortened, along with just about everything else in your personal detailing and dimension styles.

I set up ones which looked more like our original styles, but thus far we have pretty much stuck with the ProSteel defaults, which don't move me, but they certainly enable me to get a hell of a lot more sleep than I used to.

 

Just about all of our drawings are done at 10:1 scale.

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