Do you review drawings? what does a good set of drawings look like to you?

Consistency through all disciplines. We had a submittal from a large multi-national A/E firm and the same piece of equipment was called something different between disciplines and even within disciplines. The P&ID would not match the mechanical plan view, and the electrical plan view didn't match either of those or the electrical one-line, etc. I think I found 6 different names for the same piece of equipment in a set of 20 drawings. Most of the names were so dissimilar that it wasn't clear they were referring to the same thing.

The drawings were prepared in the same office and not across different office locations. And they thought I was being unfair to require that they use the same name on the next review set.

I couldn't agree more.

 

I think that all CAD courses should start with a month or two of manual drawing, pencil and paper, to teach the basics of laying out your drawings before you start. (You cant just move a view on the paper if you need more space).

 

 

My other bugbear is people who learn how to use basic cad and then expect to be able to work as engineers, even though they do not have the knowledge.

Its funny you mentiuon this, almost every CAD course I took (grade10/11 and first course of college) all had the first 1/3 of the course manual drafting. I find a lot of people don't have any sort of appreciation for the time and effort needed in manual drafting. Not to mention, basic sketches are still a HUGE part of engineering. You can definiately tell by looking at peoples sketeches who has manual drafting experience and who does not.

Consistency through all disciplines. We had a submittal from a large multi-national A/E firm and the same piece of equipment was called something different between disciplines and even within disciplines. The P&ID would not match the mechanical plan view, and the electrical plan view didn't match either of those or the electrical one-line, etc. I think I found 6 different names for the same piece of equipment in a set of 20 drawings. Most of the names were so dissimilar that it wasn't clear they were referring to the same thing.

 

The drawings were prepared in the same office and not across different office locations. And they thought I was being unfair to require that they use the same name on the next review set.

That is quite extreme. Who cares what it is called? Just make sure everyone calls it the same thing. Call it George for all I care. Equipment tags are great for just that.