leo603•6d ago

Got told my plotter settings were off by a senior drafter in Houston

At my last job in Houston, a senior guy looked at my hatch patterns and said they were way too tight for the print scale, I always thought denser was better... He had me test a 1:50 scale vs 1:100 on the same detail, the difference in readability was night and day. Anybody else had a small tweak like that completely change how you set up drawings?

2 comments

2 Comments

grant_ross275d ago

Oh man, that's a classic right of passage, isn't it? I had a guy once tell me my lineweights looked like they were drawn by a spider on caffeine, he made me redo an entire sheet set and I was so mad until I actually saw the plot and realized he was completely right. It's funny how such a little thing can make you look like you have no idea what you're doing even if the geometry is perfect.

the_logan5d ago

I actually just read this thing the other day about how lineweights in drafting go all the way back to hand drawn blueprints and how the thickness of your lines literally told people what to look at first so its kinda wild that some people STILL don't take it seriously. That spider on caffeine line is gold though, I'm gonna remember that one. But for real, I watched a whole presentation once where a guy showed how bad lineweights can make an entire building look like it's about to fall over on paper even when the math is perfect. It's like wearing a wrinkled suit to a job interview, the content might be good but nobody sees past the presentation. Your geometry can be flawless but if your plot looks like garbage people are gonna assume the whole thing is garbage too.