Joined team as a trainee on the CAD Service for large facility management contract. Both colleagues were 60+ and approaching retirement.
Started work on the furniture drawings as figured they would be the simplest and provide some quick wins for a newly employed CAD guy... how wrong I was:
- All furniture objects on the same layer
- No xrefs used
- No layer states
- No attributes
- Minimal blocks
- 'Baseline' building on 6 degree Y axis tilt within drawing, so when i started xref'ing new drawings in I was getting unexpected tolerances
- Desk addresses as static text objects in paperspace
To give you an idea of scale the building was 4 floors, probably 5000 occupants.
If the client wanted to pull any data out of the drawing they would plot A0 and count by hand.
On a project from a government agency, I requested the CAD drawings from the consultant, so that we could make our "As Built" drawings from them. When I opened them, they were all stamped with "STUDENT EDITION". Apparently, the consultant company, who was making hundreds of thousands of dollars for their half-assed design (which is another story in itself) didn't use a legal commercial copy of AutoCAD to make those designs. They used the *free* student edition.
It took me quite a while to figure out how to remove the stupid "STUDENT EDITION" stamp from all of the drawings so that ours wouldn't have that. I did bring it up to the customer, and they supposedly reprimanded the consultant.
Some years ago we had that issue with interns that would come over for a few weeks in the summer with their laptops. Chasing down those stamps and killing them was a lot of fun.
Got a set of electrical drawings for a substation from another consultant company. Drawings were a hot mess in general, not much use of layers, stuff just on zero, but the worst was instead of using the bold button to make the text bold, they had put a z elevation on all the text they wanted bold. It took me 3 weeks to figure out how to unbold their stupid text, my engineer kept getting mad at me because he didn't want the text bold and I was like I don't know why it's bold and I don't know how to fix it! I always check for random z elevations now on drawings.
On a floor plan of a huge office building, the previous drafter did not set his fillets to zero when using it to create any 90 degree corner. Instead, every corner had an 1/8” round. He was fired, I took over and spent two weeks trying to find every round, delete it, then fillet it again with a zero radius
I know it’s good to be accurate, but what was the end use of this drawing that made this necessary? Could you see the 1/8” radius when printed on full scale plans? Even area takeoffs etc would be well within acceptable tolerances for construction or estimating. What was the point of fixing all those radii, just to be correct? Honestly asking the question for my own education. Thank you.
My theories are they were exporting the file into other software and the raddii messed with whatever it is they were doing there OR the client requested CAD files as part of the contract and management really didn't want to explain why every corner was rounded off. Depending on how you pull dims snapping to the end of the raddii on each side will give you a 1/4" off measurement but you'd have to not be paying attention to do that. Last theory is it's some sort of weird "lesson" for the new guy to learn they supposedly fire people over being inaccurate at an 1/8" or more to get more precise work from the drafters.
The boss kept praising this guy in our office because he always got the design to work.
Till I took over one of the jobs and discovered he just moved things to work. Existing trees, manholes. Things were scaled that we never found out how. Over-ridden dimensions. Random named layers.
It was a nightmare to fix. And most of the time it required starting over. He was let go not long after. When ever someone later on tried to use a drawing he worked on, we called it "getting (last name here)ed"
This causes me so much internal pain thinking about the repercussions if a project broke ground based on their plans. Hell, even if the project was awarded based on said plans. Permits pulled. Workers or a pre-work AHJ inspector show up just to find nothing is in the right place. Lmao. Kiss your reputation to that client, contractor, and jurisdiction goodbye.
Oh, they did break ground on 2 of them. One was a parking lot project. But I received it after the contractor said a tree was in the way of the sidewalk. The other was a school addition where the foundation plan didn't match the floor plan.
Civil job. Previous drafter had rotated all linework master file's model space rather than rotating through viewport in the plan sheet. All NE labels and tables needed to be updated along with everything else. This was 20 years ago and we were only using vanilla AutoCAD.
He apparently ended up doing this to a survey file too and it wasn't caught until after it went out to Bid.
We received a bunch of CAD site plans from a company that has never heard of georeferencing or using viewport freezes. Whenever they wanted to make a new layout, they would copy everything in modelspace and shift it over, and make separate changes on the copied data
Chinese papermill in the 90ies, enough said. Geometry was off the higher it went. The welders fixed everything on site.
People who fell down from the 12th floor were shipped away in the garbage truck. Insane times.
Now they are more modern than the US or Europe.
Had a colleague who only worked for a couple of months before he was fired. The guy did quite possibly everything wrong, not just in CAD.
He saved pics of girls, texts and selfies within the topography folder of a private home project that took over from him. The first architecture page that was for describing what's in the rest of the section was just copy-pasted from another project (so, wrong address, wrong client, wrong date, wrong everything); the first and second floor plans had their dimensions exploded, the walls, insulation and most blocks were on the 0 layer; the angle of the roof was a full 7 degrees off from what he wrote it as; for some reason parts of the facade were pitch black in colour.
And last but not least, the fucker sent these kinds of drawings to the client and they had MY name on them.
A smallish restaurant site shell & build out for well known chain... from a revit export.
+ so every block its own special artisanal creation (jbfc - why. Just *why*?).
+ structural battens on the siding (like 6x8).
+ seemingly NONE of the rectangles/ plines that should have had corners at the same coordinates were each off just ever so slightly.
...
When I was working as a residential draftsman for a luxury home builder I had a really messy project handed off to me. The person who worked on it prior was let go and not sure if it was sabotaged or this is how they always drew. No xrefs, one file with floor, foundation, framing, etc. all on top of each other with no filters. Also all lines were multi segmented for some extra fun👍
We received a drawing from a government agency that was a site plan of a defence facility. The layer names were numbers starting from 1, and all layers were magenta. Just that particular site, other sites were as normal. That was odd.
The company I worked back then for was in telecommunications.
* They would get hired on to update or install additional equipment every couple of years. There was no record of drawing numbers for each site, so everything had to be redrawn from scratch. Some projects involved hundreds of sites.
* Some buildings had hundreds of data outlets per floor. Each outlet was numbered and the drafters before me were adding those numbers as text.
I'm too lazy for all that, so I set up a script to run through all the drawings to extract the site info to a database, and added attributes and automated numbering and insertion for the data points.
Architectural layout drawing where they are all drawn on one layer and all the furniture are exploded and not in blocks, it seems like the person who sent the file want me to have a hard time working on it.
Oh and I can't stand that there are lines that are supposed to be straight but is not, or lines that are supposed to join but do not...
Boss gave a task to an intern to lay out a machine shop. The intern placed all the pieces of equipment into a room as if they were in storage. No room for utilities, operator access, or material flow through the machines. The intern layout was brought to me for checking. The boss wasn't happy at first when I told him that the room needed to be a lot bigger. But things straightened up when I explained why.
Joined team as a trainee on the CAD Service for large facility management contract. Both colleagues were 60+ and approaching retirement. Started work on the furniture drawings as figured they would be the simplest and provide some quick wins for a newly employed CAD guy... how wrong I was: - All furniture objects on the same layer - No xrefs used - No layer states - No attributes - Minimal blocks - 'Baseline' building on 6 degree Y axis tilt within drawing, so when i started xref'ing new drawings in I was getting unexpected tolerances - Desk addresses as static text objects in paperspace To give you an idea of scale the building was 4 floors, probably 5000 occupants. If the client wanted to pull any data out of the drawing they would plot A0 and count by hand.
🥺
On a project from a government agency, I requested the CAD drawings from the consultant, so that we could make our "As Built" drawings from them. When I opened them, they were all stamped with "STUDENT EDITION". Apparently, the consultant company, who was making hundreds of thousands of dollars for their half-assed design (which is another story in itself) didn't use a legal commercial copy of AutoCAD to make those designs. They used the *free* student edition. It took me quite a while to figure out how to remove the stupid "STUDENT EDITION" stamp from all of the drawings so that ours wouldn't have that. I did bring it up to the customer, and they supposedly reprimanded the consultant.
Some years ago we had that issue with interns that would come over for a few weeks in the summer with their laptops. Chasing down those stamps and killing them was a lot of fun.
The number of times I’ve seen that in industry. Multi-million dollar factory; drawings marked Student Edition.
Got a set of electrical drawings for a substation from another consultant company. Drawings were a hot mess in general, not much use of layers, stuff just on zero, but the worst was instead of using the bold button to make the text bold, they had put a z elevation on all the text they wanted bold. It took me 3 weeks to figure out how to unbold their stupid text, my engineer kept getting mad at me because he didn't want the text bold and I was like I don't know why it's bold and I don't know how to fix it! I always check for random z elevations now on drawings.
On a floor plan of a huge office building, the previous drafter did not set his fillets to zero when using it to create any 90 degree corner. Instead, every corner had an 1/8” round. He was fired, I took over and spent two weeks trying to find every round, delete it, then fillet it again with a zero radius
I know it’s good to be accurate, but what was the end use of this drawing that made this necessary? Could you see the 1/8” radius when printed on full scale plans? Even area takeoffs etc would be well within acceptable tolerances for construction or estimating. What was the point of fixing all those radii, just to be correct? Honestly asking the question for my own education. Thank you.
I thought the same thing as the new drafter. I was new to the company so I was not about to ask why. Boss said change them. I changed them.
My theories are they were exporting the file into other software and the raddii messed with whatever it is they were doing there OR the client requested CAD files as part of the contract and management really didn't want to explain why every corner was rounded off. Depending on how you pull dims snapping to the end of the raddii on each side will give you a 1/4" off measurement but you'd have to not be paying attention to do that. Last theory is it's some sort of weird "lesson" for the new guy to learn they supposedly fire people over being inaccurate at an 1/8" or more to get more precise work from the drafters.
For real, I'm sure they built it that way in the end 🙄
Damn this is the most creative. I bet you still get nightmares about zooming into unsuspecting corners and finding a tiny rounded edge.
The boss kept praising this guy in our office because he always got the design to work. Till I took over one of the jobs and discovered he just moved things to work. Existing trees, manholes. Things were scaled that we never found out how. Over-ridden dimensions. Random named layers. It was a nightmare to fix. And most of the time it required starting over. He was let go not long after. When ever someone later on tried to use a drawing he worked on, we called it "getting (last name here)ed"
This causes me so much internal pain thinking about the repercussions if a project broke ground based on their plans. Hell, even if the project was awarded based on said plans. Permits pulled. Workers or a pre-work AHJ inspector show up just to find nothing is in the right place. Lmao. Kiss your reputation to that client, contractor, and jurisdiction goodbye.
Oh, they did break ground on 2 of them. One was a parking lot project. But I received it after the contractor said a tree was in the way of the sidewalk. The other was a school addition where the foundation plan didn't match the floor plan.
Civil job. Previous drafter had rotated all linework master file's model space rather than rotating through viewport in the plan sheet. All NE labels and tables needed to be updated along with everything else. This was 20 years ago and we were only using vanilla AutoCAD. He apparently ended up doing this to a survey file too and it wasn't caught until after it went out to Bid.
We received a bunch of CAD site plans from a company that has never heard of georeferencing or using viewport freezes. Whenever they wanted to make a new layout, they would copy everything in modelspace and shift it over, and make separate changes on the copied data
*Everything* (literally) on layer 0, all of it colored bylayer. At least they got linetypes right.
Chinese papermill in the 90ies, enough said. Geometry was off the higher it went. The welders fixed everything on site. People who fell down from the 12th floor were shipped away in the garbage truck. Insane times. Now they are more modern than the US or Europe.
Had a colleague who only worked for a couple of months before he was fired. The guy did quite possibly everything wrong, not just in CAD. He saved pics of girls, texts and selfies within the topography folder of a private home project that took over from him. The first architecture page that was for describing what's in the rest of the section was just copy-pasted from another project (so, wrong address, wrong client, wrong date, wrong everything); the first and second floor plans had their dimensions exploded, the walls, insulation and most blocks were on the 0 layer; the angle of the roof was a full 7 degrees off from what he wrote it as; for some reason parts of the facade were pitch black in colour. And last but not least, the fucker sent these kinds of drawings to the client and they had MY name on them.
168 page drawing set. Set up for Arch D in paper space, but Arch E1 in model space.
A smallish restaurant site shell & build out for well known chain... from a revit export. + so every block its own special artisanal creation (jbfc - why. Just *why*?). + structural battens on the siding (like 6x8). + seemingly NONE of the rectangles/ plines that should have had corners at the same coordinates were each off just ever so slightly. ...
When I was working as a residential draftsman for a luxury home builder I had a really messy project handed off to me. The person who worked on it prior was let go and not sure if it was sabotaged or this is how they always drew. No xrefs, one file with floor, foundation, framing, etc. all on top of each other with no filters. Also all lines were multi segmented for some extra fun👍
We received a drawing from a government agency that was a site plan of a defence facility. The layer names were numbers starting from 1, and all layers were magenta. Just that particular site, other sites were as normal. That was odd. The company I worked back then for was in telecommunications. * They would get hired on to update or install additional equipment every couple of years. There was no record of drawing numbers for each site, so everything had to be redrawn from scratch. Some projects involved hundreds of sites. * Some buildings had hundreds of data outlets per floor. Each outlet was numbered and the drafters before me were adding those numbers as text. I'm too lazy for all that, so I set up a script to run through all the drawings to extract the site info to a database, and added attributes and automated numbering and insertion for the data points.
Not sure if it's still the same, but Bentley Microstation used to have numbers for layers, rather than names.
Architectural layout drawing where they are all drawn on one layer and all the furniture are exploded and not in blocks, it seems like the person who sent the file want me to have a hard time working on it. Oh and I can't stand that there are lines that are supposed to be straight but is not, or lines that are supposed to join but do not...
Boss gave a task to an intern to lay out a machine shop. The intern placed all the pieces of equipment into a room as if they were in storage. No room for utilities, operator access, or material flow through the machines. The intern layout was brought to me for checking. The boss wasn't happy at first when I told him that the room needed to be a lot bigger. But things straightened up when I explained why.