Using a customer provided drawing drawn by an outside contractor

[peteohms]

I'm new here and not very cad savvy. I was hired to design a railroad track for a customer. (I have experience in track design). The customer provided me with design drawings which were done for them by a local track design company. I would like to use these drawings and modify them for a base for my new design.

 

I presume the customer provided drawings belong to the customer since they paid for the work.

 

May I use the drawings as a basis for my drawings and just change the title block?

 

Pete

[Organic]

In my opinion, yes. The client paid for them to be created and has been delivered the digital files also obviously. A quick phonecall to confirm with the client/other company can't hurt though.

 

Try to obtain the design files the other company used if possible (i.e. whatever program it was actually designed in whether that was Civil 3D, 12d, some other rail specific program etc), not just the AutoCad files.

[Cadologist]

It's common practice to make a note on the drawings that will contain this external data, something along the lines of a disclaimer stating that various entities contained within this drawing are from external sources and used with permission from the client, something to that nature. There are multiple ways to word it but it's a good idea to make a note on the drawings for liability and other contract inclusions.

 

Your project manager for this project (if it's not you directly) or someone higher up in your company will be able to help with this, or there may be a typical note used on other projects within your company.

[ReMark]

In a similar situation for a company I used to work for we would ADD our title block to the outside contractor's drawing and referenced any changes we made to the original design concept with a revision number. There was no doubt as to which company was responsible for what content. Everybody was happy.

[DANIEL]

you should be fine so long as you have contracts in place, the one thing I won't ever do is modify someone elses drawing and leave there border on it, if i have to make changes its resubmitted with our title block information with notes rferring back to the vendors.

[CyberAngel]

We couldn't do our work if we didn't start with a surveyor's drawing. We change the layer names, fonts, etc. to conform to our standards, but usually that's all. Naturally we cite the surveyor's original work.

[bigcarpchaser]

We will generally acknowledge other peoples drawings when utilising a file created from an external source, generally because they're crap and I'd be embarrassed if someone though that'd we'd done them

In all seriousness, we couldn't do our job without files from architects, engineers, interior designers etc.

Never use someone else's title block. I'd consider that close to fraudulent. Whether or not the CAD files actually belong to the client who's paying for the project or the drawing originator is probably a mute point and could be argued either way. I suspect that copyright law would suggest that the drawing originator would be the actual "owner".

I will say though, that in 20 odd years in the business, we've never had an issue yet. Bound to crop up eventually. I've had drawings sent back to me that we worked on ten years ago....looking a bit different though

Reminds of something I found quite amusing. I was interviewing a chap for a role here and he turned up with some hardcopy plots as an example of his "work". Sure enough, his initials were in the title block. What he hadn't realised is that we'd worked for hsi previous employer on that project and had actually produced the drawings he was trying to pass off as his own. What a twonk. Suffice to say, he didn't get much further than a brief chat

[Strix]

I agree with most of the above, but make sure you preserve traceability - that is, store the drawing you were provided with, and generating your own drawing by 'save as', that way liability can be proven if it's ever necessary. Many drawings I've worked on had title blocks from several companies as they've changed hands, but mostly from companies still adhering to a hard copy method of working. Companies such as Mars (Pedigree Masterfoods) always insisted on only their title block being present on any drawing when it was 'returned' to them, so when we received a rev k drawing we'd no idea how many different companies had had it before us

 

I was once given a stack of CDs and some photo's, and asked to locate the original design drawings for the installation on the photo's. The photo's were of a factory destroyed by fire, with control system cabinets full of melted cables. The factory were blaming my company for a design fault, but we needed to prove that they'd uprated the motors since we did the installation. I found them eventually, but it led to some changes in how drawings were archived!