Topic: assembling a drawing.

[jonesy]

I'd like some advice please

I have just picked up a "set" of drawings produced by a summer placement, who having done one course of CAD at uni, were left unsupervised whilst producing the drawings. Now they have left, and I have to start amending these drawings, to take into account the clients wishes and engineers re-design.

Many of these drawings have the same objects in the drawing... but are in fact stored as live objects in each drawing, there have been NO xrefs used. To make things more complex, the "base" scale on some of the drawing sheets are different to others and the information (building outline, and all the inners of the building) on the larger scale drawings have been removed/trimmed back and moved to a different 0,0 so the building wont even "tile" together. And instead of changing one or two xrefs, if I continue using the drawings as they are, I have many drawings to alter with the same information.

One of my thoughts are to create a building outline and use it as a base xref, then assemble the drawings from this base...

So my question to you fine folks...

Is it wise to carry on using the original drawings, or would it be better to assemble new cad files? (If the latter, how would I justify that with "the powers that be")

What would you do in this situation?

Many thanks for any advice
T

[hudster]

I would change it now, if you leave it, it would only mean more work in the future if the drawings revise again.

[Rob...]

Ditto.

Prevention something something cure. Sorry, haven't had my coffee yet.

[jonesy]

I've started on the merry road to changing the way its been setup... this is proving more difficult than I first thought
So many problems... so many things on the wrong layer.... so many things not set to bylayer... and they are just the easy fix items

[SDETERS]

I would just redoo the entire drawing

It does not take that long to redo once you know what is going on.  The time is in the layouts and thinking and wondering where everything goes.  Once everything is in place it should take half the time it took the first to redoo.  To justify to other people.  Calculate the time roughly to fix this drawing versus time it would take to redraw it.  Also Like Hudson said what if it changes again in the future?  What other mistakes are on this drawing that is not popping out?  I guarantee if the cad file is messed up the information inside the file locations dimensions specs or what not is hosed up also.

[CAB]

I farmed out a drawing when I was too busy to do it, to a fellow who worked for a bank vault company doing there drawings.
I assumed he new how to do construction drawings & asked that he use a picture of a floor plan inserted & scaled in the drawing
to guide him as to where the walls needed to be. A technique I use all the time. Well when he was done the walls were as I asked.
They were 4 6 & 8 inch walls but the wall to wall measurements were anything but on the inch. Like 6'-5.3415"
There was no fix, so I re drew the entire two story. Lesson learned.


You can fix a lot of things with the lisp files found here, like 'blocks to zero' for making all line work in the block layer zero.
Also objects to ByLayer can be restored with a lisp. You can move objects from one layer to another but only if you can
isolate the ones needing to be moved.  Moving every thing to a common origin shouldn't be that big a deal.

But as already said, if you can re draw the entire project faster why bother. If not I'll be glad to send you some lisp files.

[jonesy]

Thanks guys.
It looks like its going to have to be a compromise. I hate shoddy work, but they want a full set of drawings for tomorrow lunch time So some things will have to be left alone

[craigr]

This is a GREAT Topic!!!!! - (Not enough exclamation points).

I wish it came up a while back when we had a similar thing happen.

I couldn't explain why it was easier to re-draw, than to fix. So, we kept the drawing. Every now and then that same drawing is used as something to steal a part from, so the 'bad drawing' gets spread through MANY drawings. - VERY frustrating and tough to fix.

IMO, if you can fix it, or re-draw it, DO IT!

craigr

[mjfarrell]

Jonesy, this is a time when pushing that data through MAP, and using some of the tools found there would be the ticket to fixing this data.  I understand your deadline.

Another option, would be to open the source files with their multiple instances of objects, and a NEW template file. Tile them all together and then drag and drop into the new file, using the Original Coordinates operation.  Should you find that data is not lining up, then alter the base point of the bad file and continue as above.

[jonesy]

Michael, do you have a map tutorial on your site? What commands in particular may help me?

I've got to the point with this drawing of worrying that I've took the wrong objects out of the file...