I can understand John's frustration in receiving drawings that are more complex than they need to be – that just adds to the cost. I'm not sure that small caps are necessary with a machine drawn font, there isn't the possibility of misreading handwriting.

As far as contributions to ME/MEW are considered, I would happily work to a house style if there was one. At the moment it's just a best guess as to what is appropriate for the perceived audience Any comments/criticism gratefully recieved.

Rod

Without politicising this debate, was it not the EITB ( Engineering Industry Training Board ) who some years ago instituted regular reports from firms regarding the "on the job training" they were providing as a means of firms evading the Training Board Levy and so give rise to the rank of Training Provider.
The GD&T nicely fell into that era and the tutoring of GT&D satisfied the need for "the suits" to show that sufficient funds had been expended on relevant training to minimise or eliminate the EITB levy.
That, together with the introduction of new style Standards that said a lot but told you nothing specific ensured the stratospheric growth of Training Companies offering On or Off Site training courses in any subject you could dream up and charging mega bucks in the process.
It was of little concern that the subject matter was frequently nether relevant nor understood by the target audience.
As John Stevenson says, looking up GD&T brings forth all these con men but I did spot that one or two offer pocket books such as "The Ultimate Guide to GD&T" to go alongside our engineers pocket guide. Is it possibly a suitable "freebe" for our worthy editor to offer for extended magazine subscription?

Meanwhile, I do hope it stops raining soon and we can all get back to cutting metal but heres wishing all a Merry christmas

Bob D

Edited By Robert Dodds on 21/12/2012 23:07:31

When I was a lad, some decades ago, like JS we used BS308 as our guide. Mind you this was in the days that a draughtsman was supposed to be the person who made sense of the Engineers' fantasies, so that the guys on the shop floor had some chance of making what the Engineer wanted. At the time, where I worked you had to be a tradesman to qualify for training to become a draughtsman.

We always used upper font characters for everything, the clarity of the character was paramount.

Then along came CAD. Some old school draughtsmen made the leap from drawing board to computer terminal. Some did, I didn't. The suits managed to lose the link between Engineer and workshop, the draughtsman became a CAD Operator, and a new specialisation was invented……Design for Manufacture.

I spent the last twenty years of my working life spending large amounts of my time doing Design for Manf. checks on new drawing packs and being amazed at the new graduates being employed as CAD Operators who had the full bottle on most aspects of Geo. Tolerancing, model manipulation, etc etc, but who didn't know the difference between a lathe and a mill, let alone how to actually make anything.

Boy am I glad I'm retired!!

cheers

Bill

Here's my 2p as a young professional CAD jokey / Draftsman / Design Engineer:

I have never had the need to use GD&T and as such don't know how to use it. Of course most of the technical skills I have are learnt through the job rather than uni (I can feel a rant coming on regarding how universities can justify their lack of training but I will supress for the time being). I use Solidworks and AutoCAD. I use Solidworks to create 90% of my "models" as they are so easy and quick to manipulate and revise during the development period. However, unless I am sending a 3D model to RP or to a mould tool maker, published drawings are ALWAYS done through AutoCAD – numbered and dated. Forget trying to publish a drawing using Solidworks' native drafting package! Unless every supplier is solidworks compatible this is a lost cause and it pushes so much crap onto your drawing you'll end up with a headache. As such I export to dxf and create my own drawing with all dims and annotations added manually, trying to keep to BS as much as possible – setting the dimension style, tolerances and precision to how it would suit for that drawing and material.

Getting to the point: Adding revisions – I often have to annotate with the drawing equivalent of a big slap in the face to get them to pay attention to the changes – can you blame us for going outside the boundaries of accepted drawing doctrine if what we get back sometimes relates in no way to the drawing.

Edited By Thomas Gude on 16/01/2013 17:54:08

Thomas, If you are designing in SW (Solidworks CAD) then exporting to DXF (Drawing Exchange Format files) to import back as dumb (no parametric relationship between the drawing entities and their dimensions) sketches into Autocad (I have another name for it but we will give that a miss!) you are making your life very very hard…..

You should be able to generate 2D (detail) drawings quicker in SW than you can move the mouse – if not, you should get better training specific to SW. I use SW as a design engineer and have worked in some places that still require ACAD drawings – but only due to a huge quantity of legacy data that they will not convert. The only other people that use ACAD (cad files with .dwg extension on the end) are those who do not have a 3D CAD system available.

I have my seat (software licence) configured to a customised BS scheme for drawing and detailing but all the standards are available should I be asked to work to something else (happens very occasionally for some of the bigger clients). As far as drawing revision goes, I use PDM Works for my office and it works great when you understand how to set it up and manage it.

So, in a nut shell and back to the original post, what really matters is whether or not the drawings are unambiguous. If they are you will get what you are expecting but if they are not then you may well get the problems mentioned. The other point about drawing in 3D is the notion that you often have to approach the job as if you were in the machine shop which does require a little shop floor experience at least (I tell fibs, it requires a boat load of thought and experience!).

Mark

*formatting: something very wierd*

Edited By Thomas Gude on 16/01/2013 22:45:58

Thomas, it sounds like your tutor could do with some re-training!

On the idea of letting SW detail a drawing – only when I'm in need of some entertainment…. I never use auto dimensions, I simply create my layouts (usually manually) and then dimension away using the various dimension tools (ordinates being favourite as they are very much liked by the machine shop).

It never occurred to me that you had tried to get automatic drawings out of SW, I too have been using it since '98 and enjoyed giving the technical demonstrators a hard time when they first tried to sell this function to us. One thing you certainly can do is check for missing dimensions automatically after you are done in manual mode – few things more embarrassing than a gloating machinist with a missing dimension…..

By the way, I only have one seat as there is only me in my consultancy but I have a network, server (old pc) and PDM running quite happily, all administered my me with support from my VAR.

Mark

Edited By Mark C on 17/01/2013 00:48:09

Jeff daymans sentiments are quite accurate "garbage faster"

I was trained on a drawing board so was taught the art of understanding the need to convey information

Cad systems which i have used most of them Solidworks Inventor Pro E NX and Catia allow you to create 3d models and the drawing is just an afterthought IMHO Its only recently there is no need for a drawing anymore ,the digital model is king in some larger institutions where asme y is making inroads ,However they missed the fact that a machinist likes to have a drawing pinned somewhere near a machine and it isnt going away as quick as they thought it would

As for BS whatever im sure it used to mean "British Standard" not standard which we will work around to suit everyone and their company's way of doing things hence there is a lack of standard BS8888 is certainly a hotchpotch of differing requirements for the europeans rather than the British

However you can get the kids to work to a standard if its set up Solidworks certainly allows you to define BS308 Or BS8888 and automatically draft a drawing using that however as the digital model is dumb when it comes to actually recognising what you put into it in referance to tolerances etc (PRO e is the exception here it wont actually let you define something that is at geometric odds with each other),wether the kid in front of it understands what geometric tolerance or even basic drafting projection is without googling it is a completely different matter

"Fractured into many parts", says Richard. And how! There's actually a Standard now (can't be bothered to look up the number) that specifies a Standard Temperature for measurement. Title page… List of contents.. scope…list of references…bodies responsible…. all the usual blather. And then comes the actual nub or gist of the whole thing – 20 deg C. And they expect you to pay about thirty quid for it. No doubt they'll update it in a few years to amend the bibliography and make you buy a new one.

Going back to SolidWorks – I've been using it at work since 2001 (Pro/E before that) and I cannot comprehend why on earth anybody would want to convert it to AutoCad to produce drawings. DXF export for laser-cutting, yes. If you build the model properly in the first place, show all the model dimensions in the drawing, and then have the two-way associativity between drawing and model, what else do you need? If your drawing standards are so anal that SW can't produce drawings to your requirements, quite frankly it's time to change your drawing standards.

I take John Stevenson's original gripe about Geometric Tolerancing – I seldom if ever use it, preferring to stick a note on the drawing to the effect that the surface must be flat within whatever, and append a sketch showing how to check it. We're not aerospace, so our machine shop chaps aren't clued up on Geom Tols, because we simply don't need it for the kind of work we do.

What I like about SolidWorks is that they let you have your own copy of it for use at home. So I've used it for Proper Purposes….

Nigel, why has your engine not got any wings and a prop on the front?

Anyway, onto the autocrap conversation – the reason we still have autocad in engineering is due to the skinflint subby shops that cant cover the cost of the software and the time to learn how to use it (minimal) or due to long in the tooth design office managers who are too stubborn to wake up and smell the coffee.

You can also have as many layers as you want in Solidworks (are you talking multi sheet or multi layer, either way the export function is pretty flexible if you know what you want and what you are doing) if you really have to deal with subbys who "insist" on dwg or dxf, but they generally want paper drawings anyway, or fax if they are modern….

Please see above for a solidworks dimensioned compound angle c/w strange angled sides and awkward to machine hole in the middle! – all done without a single bit of command line funny talk! Out of interest, that little model took about 15 min to draw and come with full associativety – if I decide I got a bit the wrong size, I just change the dimension to the new size and the drawing changes as well – you don't get that with autowatsit

Mark

Richard, if you sent out models for cast parts, how come you didn't send configurations with shrinkage added? Seems a bit unfair to dump the advanced technology for the sake of a communication issue. I use sheet metal on occasion and it always takes a bit of testing to get the bend factor correct to suit a particular fabricator and his tooling but they would rather do a few test bends and have profiles they can cut cnc than do it all manually (the fabricators seem to be more comfortable with cnc than the machine shops – perhaps is a cost thing?).

Mark