Rewriting an old print set manually versus trusting the CAD export - which comes out cleaner in the field?

I spent last Tuesday on a job for a small commercial building remodel in Portland, and I had two sets of the same floor plan. One I cleaned up by hand in the field with a red pencil, one came straight from the CAD file at 1/4 inch. The hand marked set was actually easier for the crew to read, even though the CAD version had perfect line weights. The foreman said he preferred the hand notes because they showed what I actually measured versus what the computer assumed. Has anyone else found that sometimes the old analog method beats the digital output, or was this just a fluke on a complex layout?

2 comments

2 Comments

wyatt51319d ago

Yeah, that "field sense" thing is spot on. I had a similar thing last month where the CAD said a wall was straight but my hand notes caught a 1/2 inch bow that saved us from fighting drywall all day.

colemiller19d ago

Read a piece not too long ago from an old surveyor talking about how hand annotations capture the "field sense" that CAD drawings always miss. He said a digital file is just a perfect map of what someone assumed was there. Makes total sense if you ask me. I remember a concrete pour I bid on where the CAD said the footing setback was dead on, but the hand marked plan from the surveyor's notes caught that the foundation wall was 3/4 inch off at the north corner. We saved about 4 hours of rebar cutting because of it. The computer can't put eyes on the ground. It can't see the crooked curb or the column that was poured 2 inches out of plumb. Hand marks show you what actually walked the job site, not what the software decided.