Discover how to handle and understand the scale at which a drawing will be presented in CAD design. This article provides an in-depth guide on managing layers, preloading blocks, and dealing with engineering scales.
Key Insights
- The tutorial discusses the process of managing layers in a CAD design project. The author changes the current layer from C property to 0, before inserting and preloading blocks into the drawing.
- Engineering scales are crucial when working on a site plan, with the drawing being brought into the sheet file at a scale factor of one inch equals 10 feet. The author further demonstrates how to set the scale factor and delete unnecessary elements in the drawing.
- In addition to scale management, the author also elaborates on the insertion of symbols such as the point of beginning and the north arrow into the drawing. This requires a change in layer and setting the appropriate scale factor for these symbols.
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What I'd like for us to do is to bring in our no-plot view so we can begin to understand the scale at which this drawing will ultimately be presented. You can see that my current layer is C property, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go on and make 0 my current layer. And I'm going to go to insert, go to insert itself, and what's happening is that within this drawing I have already preloaded the blocks.
Now you can always go out to browse, and if you go to browse, and if you go to CAD 302, and if you choose the no-plot full drawing and go open, you can see it's going to say specify insertion point on screen. I'm going to go OK, and it's going to say there's already a copy of that block within this drawing. Do you want to redefine it and update it? You can say redefine, no problem.
But I'm going to bring in the no-plot view. Here is the no-plot view at 1 to 1, and you can see how we're working on a site, and why is the no-plot view so large relative to a site. So I'm just going to pop it in so I can have it there and not hanging in.
The reason it's so large relative to the site is that in this drawing our base units represent a foot. So instead of using inches, we are using feet as our definition. So since the title block was drawn essentially at 22 × 34, and that if I were to say, for example, what's the distance from the end of here to the end of here, you can see that that says it's 116, that this 22 × 34 relative to 116 feels about right.
So again, I have my civil drawing units, I have my architectural units. Unit to unit, when I bring the no-plot view in, it's being brought in as 22 × 34 units. So what's going on is, again, we're working on the site plan, we're working with decimal units, where in this drawing one unit represents a foot.
So I have to deal with engineering scales. Now in architectural drawings, we're working on half inch equals a foot, quarter inch equals a foot, eighth of an inch equals a foot, scale factors of 24, 48, and 96. Whereas in engineering drawings for site plans, we frequently work on one inch represents 10 feet, one inch represents 20 feet, one inch represents 30 feet.
So our drawing will actually be brought in to the sheet file at a scale factor of one inch equals 10 feet. So again, one inch equals 10 feet, when 10 feet is my unit here, my multiplier will end up being 10. So I'm going to delete this guy out, and what I'm going to say is insert the block, no-plot view full.
I'm going to say the scale factor is 10, because again, 10, 20, 50, 100 are engineering scales compared to the 24, 48, 96 that we're using architecturally. So I'm going to say bring the no-plot view in at a scale factor of 10, go OK, and now here is my no-plot view. And so I'm just going to save the file.
We have this guy in there, and we're just going to bring a few things in, and then we're going to start dealing with orientations and rotations and that sort of good stuff. So I now want to bring my point of beginning block in and put it down there. So I'm going to go to the home tab, and I'm going to make my layer to now be C annotative symbols.
Because if you remember in some of our previous classes, we mentioned that most drafting symbols are drawn on layer 0, and they're brought in on the appropriate annotative or symbol layer. So again, my point of beginning file is on layer 0. I'm going to bring it in on the C anno-syms layer, and when I do that, because the point of beginning file is on 0, it will fully take on the characteristics of the C annotative symbology layer. So I'm going to go to the insert tab, go to the insert command.
Again, this is already in here. I could go browse if I'd like. I will choose POB for point of beginning.
I will give it a scale factor of 10 and go okay, and I will bring it in at the end of this line segment down here. And the last symbol I want to bring in is the north arrow. So I will say insert.
I will choose north arrow. I want this symbol to be brought in a factor of 10. I'm going to go okay, and I'm going to pop it in right here for the time being.
So again, what I've done is I've brought in my north arrow, and we know right now that going north is straight up. So I'm going to go control S to save the file and back off a little bit. If you would, get this done, and then we'll go on to our next video.