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| This is the story of our experience with setting up CAD standards for a client by closely following guidelines set by Mark MiddleBrook. An article on CAD Standards by Mark appeared in the Jan 98 issue of CADALYST magazine. My name is Tushar Suradkar and have a mechanical engineering background. I live in Aurangabad (India) and recently got a contract of training the staff of a reputed industrial unit. The staff consisted of six people from the design department - 3 of them draftsperson, 2 design engineers and the design manager himself. The training was conducted for a period of 2 months and only the 2D part wascovered. During the training, all draw and modify commands were covered along with Blocks, Layers, Hatching and Dimensioning. After the training was completed, the team set out to convert vast amount of paper drawings to CAD format. Within 15 days, I was hired once again for what I would term "pulling them out of the mess" they had created. Although the drawings were technically correct, no one bothered him/herself to set up standard layers, or blocks library. four of the members had their own version of the company logo which they had promptly converted to a block. Dimensions, hatching lines, text and material table were all on a single layer. This was the time and situation when the article on CAD Standards came to rescue. In his article Mark begins with : The next time you’re sitting around with a group of CAD managers, ask whether they have CAD manuals in their offices. Most will answer "yes" - a hefty CAD manual is one of the badges of CAD managerial prowess. If you want some real insight, ask the CAD managers why they have CAD manuals. Many will say that their manuals tell CAD users what to do. There’s some truth in that, but I think it masks more important purposes and obscurdes the proper way to go about establishing and documenting CAD standards. - Mark MiddleBrook Could not reproduce here completely for lack of permission. Read the full article Here |
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| We promptly followed the article line by line as follows :  Drawing Setup - We created templates for A4 and A3 size drawings since these were the only sizes required. Title block organization - The title block along with company logo was created for each of the paper sizes. Over time, the title block format had changed every time a new CAD manager joined/left the company. This time the title block format was standardized for ever. Entity grouping (with polylines, blocks, and groups) - Blocks for all repeating machine parts were made and implemented. Also attributes were added to existing blocks and all were reinserted. Structuring the drawing set with xrefs - We weighed upon this point very much. We tried to use as many standard parts in the form of an X-Ref for eg. they had four types of clips and 12 types of sleeves that would go into as many as 60 assemblies. When any sleeve design would change, we simply changed the original drawing and the part would update in all 60+ assemblies. This impressed the Dy. General Manager very much during the final demo. |
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| Further, One common mistake is relying on a CAD manual for implementation and enforcement of standards. A surprising number of CAD managers continue to believe, despite human nature and all evidence to the contrary, that every CAD user reads the company CAD manual cover to cover (carefully, several times), and then refers to it continually. - Mark MiddleBrook We circumvented this obstacle by involving all the members of the design team in setting the CAD standards. Some of them have been drafting for 20 or more years now. Each member was given a chance to be heared and this got every one involved. Also, I conducted extra sessions of training where hard copies of the standards were distributed. Benefits of obeying the CAD Standards were explained and finally a test was conducted in the conference room in which there were 10 questions for 5 points each. The highest scorer was given the privilege of using the latest pentiums that the company was in process of ordering. Thus, we found the article to be evergreen and believe that it will be helpful to everyone like us (CAD users) for years to come. The successful implementation of the points in the article is the result of our hardwork and hats off to Mark (Mark Middlebrook) |