engineers and drafters

huangyhg

engineers and drafters
hi guys,
i have only been a design engineer for a very short time, but i have already noticed some practices that are proving very ineffective.
i perform a design, i have a clear idea in my head what detailed structural drawings should look like.  i do a lot of sketches, mark-up other drawings (mech, elec, arch) and give them to my drafters to produce cad drawings, but they look like crap and are riddled with errors.  i have noticed i spend most my day looking over drawings, just to hand them back to the drafters requesting changes.
question: has the time come for me to perform my own drafting?
i feel with the usability of the modern cad package that i can create my own drawings, error-free, how i want them to look and i feel i can meet my deadlines by taking this approach.
what is the general consensus on this idea? is anyone out there drafting their own designs?  
i have the same problem, however it is easy for someone who has been staring at the screen for hours to not pick up on mistakes.
i used to draft and i know how it's like.
btw you can't produce a drawing error-free, some else will always find something wrong with it.
  
i'm sure over on "draft-tips.com" there is a drafter complaining about how the engineer isn't clear enough on markups, or something like that.
you're a new engineer, maybe the best thing for you to do is ask the drafter what you can do better so these things get picked up. instead of wanting to go runoff and do it yourself, ya know?
and there's a reason why cad programs cost a ton of money... because they have a million different settings and things which make them easier to use, efficient, and put out a high quality finished product. unless you are master at these programs, using drafters are still a significantly more efficient process than doing it yourself. not to mention, most drafters (maybe not in your case because you're newer) cost less per hour than engineers, so doing the drafting yourself would hurt the budget and force you to have to finish earlier.
i couldn't agree more; the problem with the drafter still persists unless they are very skilled. if they dont know what a section will look like, what line will be dotted etc. its really a big problem for the engineers making them to understand it. they have other complex things to do.
draftsmen are rare these day, most of the trained cad operators are just computer guys.  the exception are those who learned to draw with pencil and paper.  the quality of drawings has been going steadily downhill since the introduction of cad drafting.
we've gone the way of the younger engineers doing the drafting.  cant seem to find good structural cad techs out there.  
you should make the eor and your dept manager aware of this issue if it's really out of hand.  if they dont do anything about it you should reconsider working there, because eventually something is going to come back to bite.
going the way of the younger engineers doing the drafting sounds very familiar.  it was the standard way of doing things in 1970.  not only did it train the young engineers, but also the young engineers trained the drafters so that they could get off the board.
how about getting the drafters out of the office for half a day for a bit of "real world" training?  rather than looking at lines on the screen all day every day, show them what they are drawing in the real world, how it goes together, and why it is important.
draftsmen are not what they used to be these days.  i still think its possible to produce great drawings on reasonable time limits on cad.  it just doesn't seem to happen very often.
i always try to do my own designs (structural computations) and do the drafting on cad and then i build my own buildings too and by the time im on the building site i know everything there is to know, layout dimensions are basically burnt in my brain.  
  
but i guess im fortunate that im in that sort of business.
boy, we rant about this a lot in my office.  the cad techs come out of their trade schools knowing how to push a mouse, but very little about setting up drawings and less about discipline (structural, etc.) work.  i re  
dmcgrath hit the nail on the head. whenever our drafters go out into the field and see some steel guy putting together a moment connection or how small a 4x4 tube really is when it's 15 feet tall, they can picture something more than some lines indicating a beam with a leader calling out a full-pen weld. they have been amazed every time they go out.
my two cents: if you start drafting you are going to have similar mistakes. who will be looking over your shoulder to check your work? our office has drafters that draft and engineers that design. i like it because the drafter back-checks his/her work and then the engineer back-checks the work. a minimum of two sets of eyes look over each drawing. we also have a senior drafter that the drafters can go to for questions.  
also, we engineers went to school to design, not draft. it doesn't make sense from a business perspective to do something you can pay someone else to do for much less.