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Altered Item or New Revision? ASME Standards Question


electrical_engineer

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I have a question about ASME standards regarding revisions and altered item drawings. I'm not sure if it would be more appropriate to approach the situation as a new revision of an existing drawing, or if it should be reissued as an altered item.

 

Here is the situation: I work for company A, and we are upgrading a project and drawing package originally produced by company B. Should our upgraded drawings be treated as new revisions of the original drawings, or altered item drawings?

 

See below for some applicable exerpts from the ASME standards:

 

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ASME Y14.24 Types and Applications of Engineering Drawings

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6.1 Altered Item Drawing (Figs. 11 and 12)

 

6.1.1 Description. An altered item drawing delineates the physical alteration of an existing item under the control of another design activity or defined by a nationally recognized standard. The drawing type permits the required alteration to be performed by any competent manufacturer including the original manufacturer, the altering design activity, or a third party. It establishes a new item identification for the altered item.

 

6.1.2 Application Guidelines. An altered item drawing is prepared when alteration of an existing item is required. An altered item drawing shall not be prepared to modify an existing item that was developed by the design activity.

 

6.1.3 Requirements. An altered item drawing includes:

 

(a) information necessary to identify the existing item’s form, fit, function, and performance requirements prior to alteration, including the original item identification. Unless the item being altered is defined by a nationally recognized standard, this information shall be delineated on the altered item drawing, or provided by reference to a design disclosure drawing, a vendor item control drawing, or source control drawing as applicable.

 

(b) complete details of the alteration.

 

© a unique identifier assigned to the altered item.

 

(d) re-identification marking requirements; the original item identification being replaced shall be removed or obliterated, if this can be done without damage to the item. (However, microcircuit re-identification marking shall be in addition to the existing original marking and shall be visibly separate from and in no way interfere with the existing marking.)

 

(e) the notation ALTERED ITEM DRAWING adjacent to the drawing title block.

 

(f) a parts list when the alteration necessitates any additional item(s) to produce the altered item.

 

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ASME Y14.35-1997 Revision of Engineering Drawings

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3.7 Design Activity

An activity having responsibility for the design of an item. The activity may be government, commercial, or nonprofit organization (ASME Y14.24M).

 

3.7.1 Design Activity, Current. An activity currently having responsibility for the design of an item, and

the preparation or maintenance of drawings and associated documents. Current design activity could be the original activity or new activity when that responsibility is transferred from another design activity (ASME Y14.24M).

 

3.7.2 Design Activity, Original. An activity having had responsibility originally for the design of an item and whose drawing number, name and address (city and state), or CAGE Code is shown in the title block of the drawings and associated documents (ASME Y14.24M).

 

6.2 Transfer of Drawings Between Design Activities

When transferring design responsibility for a drawing from one design activity to another, the drawing number, part number, and the design activity identification, as- signed to the drawing shall not be changed. The design activity identification such as company name, address, CAGE Code, etc., as applicable, of the new design activity shall be added above the Title block by revision action. An explanatory notation may accompany the entry of the new design activity identification above the Title block.

Edited by electrical_engineer
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Make it a new drawing with a new drawing number (and starting at revision A again) and on your titleblock.

 

Your company is going to be legally responsible now for all aspects of the design regardless of what terminology you care to use.

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It appears that section 6.2 applies. Just taking over seems to be a revision.

 

What do you mean by upgrading? Just bringing the drawings into the 21st Century, as in making them compatible with the current CAD software version and your shop drawing standards?

 

Altered item, I believe means that any actual part of the drawing object geometry itself, or materials used has been changed by a third party sub-contractor by approval of the original design activity, as in getting approval to use torx head screws instead of Phillips head.

 

Cheeez, I wish they could write these things in plain language.

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Make it a new drawing with a new drawing number (and starting at revision A again) and on your titleblock.

 

If you're making it a new drawing, why would you start with a revision? When you first issue the new drawing, there are no revisions to it. Revision A would be the first change or adjustment to the new drawing.

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If you're making it a new drawing, why would you start with a revision? When you first issue the new drawing, there are no revisions to it. Revision A would be the first change or adjustment to the new drawing.

 

Everywhere I have ever worked the first issue of a drawing is revision A. If anything changes then it is issued again as revision B and so on etc.

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That's what it was like when I started at my previous place of employment. I pointed out that it was wrong simply based on the definition of the word "revision/revise". From that point on, we referred to the drawings by issue number with 1 (or A) being the first issue. We almost completely stopped using the word revision.

 

They still had a problem understanding the difference between the words "tolerance" and "allowance" though. I would have had more success banging my head against the wall than I did trying to explain it to those idiots.

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That's what it was like when I started at my previous place of employment. I pointed out that it was wrong simply based on the definition of the word "revision/revise". From that point on, we referred to the drawings by issue number with 1 (or A) being the first issue. We almost completely stopped using the word revision.

 

They still had a problem understanding the difference between the words "tolerance" and "allowance" though. I would have had more success banging my head against the wall than I did trying to explain it to those idiots.

 

I understand what you mean and can certainly see the benefit in calling it 'issue' rather than 'revision'. I might try to implement that change in the future :)

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What do you mean by upgrading? Just bringing the drawings into the 21st Century, as in making them compatible with the current CAD software version and your shop drawing standards?

 

We are adding more functionality to the project, upgrading the hardware and software. Eventually, all instances of this project will have the upgrade. We need the drawings to match the new configuration.

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Here is the tradeoff: if we make them altered item drawings, it will make it easier to upgrade the project (which is a lot of the work we are doing), but in order to build a new project from scratch, you will need two versions of the drawing, the original version and our altered item version. Very rarely will a project be built from scratch so implementing our changes as altered item drawings makes more sense for our purposes. But there's still an argument to be made for keeping the original title block and bumping the rev. It will just be difficult to identify the changes when doing an upgrade.

 

Maybe it doesn't matter as long as we're consistent across all instances of this situation for the current and future projects?

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