Red Line Electrical Drawings - Beginner Needs Help

[RyanAJC]

I'm recently took my electrical career into the office. If your an electrician by trade then you"ll know what red line drawings are. I've been doing all my redline drawings by hand the old fashion way: with a ruler, some stenciles and a pen, but it's time consuming so i've turned to autocad to cut my time in half and make my redlines more accurate.

 

I've never used autocad before, but i'ts my understanding that I can scan a digital copy of the particular drawing to my computer, open it in auto cad and do all my editing. What I'm looking to do is put "bubbles" or "clouds" around the changes add a few shapes like circles and squares to denote my revisions.

 

Is there anyone who does this kind of work? Can you simply explain the tools process and tools which I'd need to access to achieve my goals?

 

Thanks,

 

Ryan

[Dadgad]

Welcome to the virtual neighborhood.

If you are just doing REVCLOUDS and MARKUPS, I should think you could reduce your time by about 95%, for starters, until you get good at it!

 

Start here ......... http://www.we-r-here.com/cad/

This site is well laid out, I used this 4 years ago when I started to teach myself cad online.

Very simple and reasonably concise lessons that you can do at your own pace.

It is important to familiarize yourself with the basic fundamentals, after which the work

you speak off, will be very easy.

There are lots of electrical bits included in Autocad vanilla, which will mean that you won't have to

redraw things every time you want to use them, you will just drag them off the TOOL PALETTE

with the ELECTRICAL bits.

 

Scanning hard copies sounds pretty labor intensive, and annoying.

Much better way to go is to just get the original drawing file,

give it a REV # or a new name and go from there.

Assuming, of course that most plans these days have been done

using CAD.

[ReMark]

What "electrical bits" are you referring to Dadgad and where might they be found? On a Tool palette?

 

Ryan: If all you are going to do is redline the drawing and not actually edit the contents then working with a digital copy (a scan) is possible. However, keep in mind that a scanned drawing as opposed to an actual DWG file (which AutoCAD creates) will be far larger in size. Make sure your computer is up to the task as far as RAM goes. What are your computer specs?

Edited September 7, 2012 by ReMark

[Dadgad]

I was actually referring to the standard tool palettes, which I have not really used,

now looking at the electrical one I see there isn't much on it, out of the box,

of course it could be added to.

[ReMark]

In that case the OP may need to create some of his own blocks or search for electrical schematic symbols at the CAD Block Exchange Network or the CADforum.

[JD Mather]

.... i'ts my understanding that I can scan a digital copy

Ryan

 

What is the source of these drawings.

Almost everything is done digitally these days, can't you get the original digital files or are these really old old board drawings?