As a supplier, manufacturer or veteran construction designer, the quality of your shop drawings say a lot more than your portfolio does! Good shop drawings clearly detail different components in the design and help create a clear picture of the final structure. But great shop drawings will also focus on readability, ease of understanding and a minimal amount of revisions needed to the diagram.
Traditionally, hand-drawn shop drawings offer enormous efficiency in form of design clarity and focused depth perception for the viewer. But the sophistication of 3D design software has closed this gap, with tools such as CAD helping reduce the time taken to sketch shop drawings, creating cleaner drawings, offering easier editing capabilities and finally, providing easily shareable diagrams.
Steps to Creating Clean Shop Drawings
With just a little extra effort and attention to detail, you can easily create clean, professional and accurate shop drawings.
- Views
While there are numerous views at your disposal, the following are a must have for great shop drawings.
a. Isometric, Dimetric or Trimetric
These are consolidated views which pull several components into a single comprehensive view, presenting a clear and easy to visualize an image of the final structure. Be sure to include one such view in your shop drawing, but skip adding any dimensions to it, as it can create confusion about the scale of the design.
b. Orthographic
Orthographic views are those that lie at 90-degree angles to your design. Incorporate orthographic views in your drawing by keeping the front view in the center of your design and other views placed on the appropriate sides of the front view, all axii aligned. The viewer should be able to picture using the views to create a solid 3D building design.
c. Sectional
Cross sections may be used to replace orthographic views in your shop drawings. But a better method is to add them side by side with your orthographic view, for a clearer picture. - Prefabrication
Shop drawings are used extensively by contractors to start work on prefabrication of components, saving time and money for the project. To do so, every part of the prefabricated component should be clearly detailed and presented in a disassembled view, which shows how every part fits into the whole component. - Dimensions
The biggest struggle faced by construction designers is including dimensions without creating confusion or clutter. Here are some things to keep in mind for the same.a. Use double-headed arrows, parallel to the length of the feature in question to denote dimensions.
b. Show dimensions for a particular element only once. Duplicate dimensions can cause doubts about how many unique elements are in the design.
c. Try to include all dimensional statistics in a single view, but not if it’s creating clutter in the design.
d. Never should a dimension intersect any line in the diagram.
e. For any holes in your shop drawing, dimensions should be shown with a single-headed arrow that points towards the hole. Dimensions to be represented for holes are:-
- Diameter of the hole
- Depth of the hole
- Thread type in the hole
- Shape of the hole’s lower end.
f. Variance or tolerance should be added to dimensions using a +/- symbol to denote how much the figure may vary by in a real-world setting.
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- Audit
Have an experienced and qualified auditor go over your shop drawings to monitor for inconsistencies and to help set a standard practice in place. - Collaboration
Open communication between parties is essential to collaboration. Dedicated team leads or project managers should be responsible for ensuring clarity in details of the design and to see that comments are being followed up on. - Documentation
Document the entire shop drawing process to maintain schedules, meet deadlines and optimize your process.
Did you find our shop drawing guide helpful? Technostruct is an internationally acclaimed BIM service provider, specializing in BIM design and 3D design software. Visit our site for more information.https://www.technostruct.com/
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