Master drawing template

[ReMark]

AutoCAD Electrical users. Did you create your own master drawing template (w/company titleblock/border) or rely on one of the templates that ships with ACADE?

[firsrate_caduser]

I create my own templates.

[dbroada]

we have recently updated our border so I have added both the mechanical and electrical "hidden" blocks and a whole heap of wire layers. I don't think I have even opened the supplied ones.

[ReMark]

Dave:

 

I had contemplated doing as you did. How did you go about setting it up?

[dbroada]

I'm at home now so I'll ry to write something with ACADE in front of me tomorrow. You need to add wire layers through one of the "wizards" rather than the layers manager. I have decided to add the layer name to the wire number so I spent a bit of time setting up the layer names. I have 4 red layers for my +24v power (4 different wire gauges), 4 black layers for my 0v (4 different etc. The layers get named by default with colour and gauge and I am debating leaving in the underscore or replacing them with spaces. I think I will let ACADE do its own thing most of the time though.

 

That will do for now, I'll try to give more info tomorrow.

[ReMark]

Thank you David. Your advice will be appreciated.

[dbroada]

to continue...

 

new wire layers are added through the wires|Create/Edit Wire Type menu or palette or through the wiretypesel command. This will get you a dialogue box. (picture attached?) The %C_%S default automatically gives you the colour_size layer name but I have added the ^2 manually.

 

I also inserted one electrical symbol and one mechanical symbol (then deleted and purged them) to get the hidden block added to the template plus of course set up my grid and snap settings

 

As we won't be using wire numbers in the way ACADE wants us to I have the layer name added to my automatic wire numbering with the results shown in the other attachment.

[ReMark]

All interesting ideas Dave. Thanks. Unfortunately I have an electrical engineer who has yet to tell me what he wants in the way of a template.

 

I am leaning towards using layouts because he doesn't want to take a big piece of paper into the field with him. He wants something about 1/4 the size of our largest sheet. If I had to do our electrical schematics on a sheet that size we would quadruple the number of drawings we'd have to create.

[MarkFlayler]

I create these all the time for many different clients. I guess its a good thing I am one of the two Electrical gurus at IMAGINiT. I also had a hand in the ASCENT AutoCAD Electrical Fundamentals book. (Far better than the AOTC manuals which are a day longer and treat you like an idiot). Seriously, you need to me to do the same nine steps each chapter like I don't know what I did last chapter? Glad that thing is out of print.

 

Have you set up your Project Line Descriptions (wdl), gauge/wire diameters, or description defaults yet? Or customized the MDB with your company catalog information? All this goes into a nice implementation of Electrical. I have done far too many to count nowadays but I always recommend creating your own title block and not using the Autodesk ones.

[ReMark]

Mark:

 

We are a small chemical manufacturing plant trying to take decades of hand drawn electrical schematics and put them on CAD. All of your points are well taken but I can't even get by what sheet size we're going with, or text style(s), or layers because the electrical engineer is "conflicted". He can't make up his mind. I may have to do it for him. And, as I keep reminding people, I am not an engineer (although I played one once on TV...LOL).

[ReMark]

An update:

 

I "borrowed" some content from the AutoDesk ACAD_Electrical.dwt and reworked it to suit my needs (text styles, logo, borders, layers, etc.). So now I have something we can actually use.

 

The next step is to globally change the text style for all the symbols at the request of the electrical engineer.

 

Making some progress but a lot of questions (in-house) still to be answered.