Questions for school assignment

[karenabrown]

I would be very grateful if anyone would be willing to answer these questions. They are for an assignment in my AutoCAD class.

Please give your name, general location and profession.

How long have you been using AutoCAD?

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)?

What types of standardization do you use?

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice.

[robert.1.hall72202]

I will be your first guinea pig.

How long have you been using AutoCAD?
For 15 years now.

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)?
Preliminary Design and for Production Process Maps

What types of standardization do you use?
Unsure what this means? I have created my own company cad standards that
are spefific to my field of work.

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice.
Ability to see how the product interacts with equipment before actually
purchasing any components. Helps make important decisions easier.
Helps to generate healthy discussions between team members on any given project.


I be Robert Hall, Detroit Michigan, Automotive Industry, Product Design Engineer.

[BrenBren]

I would be very grateful if anyone would be willing to answer these questions. They are for an assignment in my AutoCAD class.

Please give your name, general location and profession. Brenda Richardson, Buffalo, NY, Senior Designer

How long have you been using AutoCAD? about 12 years

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)? entire design process

What types of standardization do you use? We are currently developing our drafting standards, we have design standards, we have standard blocks, standard layers and text sizes, etc.

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice. It makes things a lot quicker, but you sometimes overlook things because it is so easy to copy things from one drawing to another.
my answers in blue

[Augi Doggie]

I would be very grateful if anyone would be willing to answer these questions. They are for an assignment in my AutoCAD class.

Please give your name, general location and profession. Kenneth Leary, Orlando, FL. Aviation Designer

How long have you been using AutoCAD? 14 years.

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)? Planning, Preliminary and final design.

What types of standardization do you use? CAD standards manual, standard templates, etc.

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice. Streamlined production and reduced editing time, increased ability to share design information.

Answers are in blue.

[Brian Myers]

Brian Myers, St Louis, Missouri - Residential Designer

I've been using AutoCAD for 17 years.

I use AutoCAD in pretty much all phases of the design/construction document process, but I'll sometimes do sketching on paper during the prelim as well.

I use my own set of standards, but they stay the same no matter what project I work on. I keep it as simple as possible.

If you have to ask what advantages CAD brings then you've never done an entire project by hand. :-) From speed to problem solving, the use of CAD has simply changed the way we do our work.

[de-co1]

Blue as well...


I would be very grateful if anyone would be willing to answer these questions. They are for an assignment in my AutoCAD class.

Please give your name, general location and profession.
- David Russell, Scotland, Senior Design Technologist (Architecture)

How long have you been using AutoCAD?
- just over 10 years

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)?
- For conceptual design, spatial design and development, presentation, and typical submission and working drawings... and it gives me an excuse to come into AUGI

What types of standardization do you use?
- Have previously developed standards for a couple of offices, but currently using a different set in current office - pertaining to drawing numbering, layering systems, plotting, and typical practice procedures related to the ACAD work.

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice.
- ADVANTAGES ~ what everyone else says.

- DISADVANTAGES ~ What everyone else says, but also cost implications for smaller practices, and the inability to keep up with new releases, thereby making one's personal improvement more difficult in terms of moving on. Furthermore, junior staff are taught on PC, and not drawing board, and therefore never really learn the true essence of what working drawings are about.

[StephenJ]

Please give your name, general location and profession.
Stephen Jarosak, Souther Vermont, Cad manager/Drafter / Architecture

How long have you been using AutoCAD?
As a job for 12 Years

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)?
Through all the phases (Schematic Design, Design Development, Construction Documents, and Construction Administration) at my old office in the DC Metro area we also used it for Modeling and Presentation

What types of standardization do you use?
Custom standardizations (I think you will find this common among your responses)

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice.
Advantages - easier to edit drawings, make revisions, layout drawings, collaborate with others in office and consultants
Disadvantages - same as others and the loss of neat clean drawings. I have to teach each new user I have encountered that clean drawings are easier to read. examples: layout of drawings on the sheet, alignment of text, spacing of text, location and spacing of dimensions, ... they seem like minor things but when put together you have a nicer presentation) But that is why I get the big bucks, hahahaha

[g_kenyon]

Please give your name, general location and profession.

G Kenyon, Detroit, MI. Design Engineer - retail fixtures.

How long have you been using AutoCAD?

12 years

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)?

We have industrial designers who use graphics programs to generate conceptual renderings. CAD & I come in when the customer wants to buy some & its time to actually figure out how to make it.

What types of standardization do you use?

ASME Y14.1

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice.

We make too many design changes, so I would hate to think of the idea of executing all those changes on board.

[Maverick91]

I would be very grateful if anyone would be willing to answer these questions. They are for an assignment in my AutoCAD class.

Please give your name, general location and profession.

Doug Draper; Arlington, Texas; CAD technician

How long have you been using AutoCAD?

About eight years, with a few breaks between.

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)?

Conceptual figures and exhibits, analyze different options and configurations, technical graphics for various reports, reference drawings, and construction documents.

What types of standardization do you use?

If the client does not have standards to follow, I have my own, internally developed CAD standards. It’s loosely based on A/E/C CADD Standard (Release 2.0, September, 2001) published by The CADD/GIS Technology Center, U.S. National CAD Standard, and my own experiences and biases. ;-)

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice.

We incorporate many of the graphics into reports, which are MS Word documents, and it’s relatively convenient to incorporate electronic graphics. Changes to plans are quick, accurate, precise, and clear on drawings. Unfortunately, some changes are relatively minor and it might seem more efficient to simply hand-sketch onto paper. Pros and cons of using CAD is a whole ‘nother volume of books. ;-)

[Wanderer]

I would be very grateful if anyone would be willing to answer these questions. They are for an assignment in my AutoCAD class.

Please give your name, general location and profession.

How long have you been using AutoCAD?

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)?

What types of standardization do you use?

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice.Melanie Stone, Missouri, Facilities Management

6 years professionally 11 years total

End user... use cad file to manage a medical facility's building systems

use home grown cad standards, layers are based on AIA short-format

easy to distribute information across the facility to the engineering, maint & construction personnel. saves repetition, keeps many things updated using x-refs.
only disadvantage is poorly done drawings being unreliable or difficult to use... otherwise, I don't know what they did before we had cad here.

[SRBalliet]

Please give your name, general location and profession.

Steven R Balliet, Phillipsburg, NJ, CAD Manager, Civil & Structural Engineering (Road & Bridge)

How long have you been using AutoCAD?

12-15 Years (I lost count)

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)?

Start to finish

What types of standardization do you use?

Standards that were developed in house through a CAD Standards Comm.

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice.

Advantages:

Accuracy
Being able to reuse parts of drawings again
Space management
Etc.

Disadvantages:

IMHO in the olden days (I'm almost 50, and doing hand drafting before AutoCAD), engineers thought more about what they wanted before it went down on paper with minor revisions after that. With Cad they seem to say "Lets see how this works, draw it up in CAD" When they don't like it they redesign, we redraft, they redesign, we redraft......finally we hear "Hey that looks good lets use this one or lets go back to design revision 7. It just seems that the design was done quicker before CAD, but know the drafting is quicker because of CAD. Just my thoughts.

[G_Sarver]

Please give your name, general location and profession.

Gary Sarver Baltimore, MD Engineering Manager

How long have you been using AutoCAD?

19 years

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)?

We use it throughout the whole process. Design, submittal, fabrication/assembly and later erection.

What types of standardization do you use?

We utilize company template that is located on our file server with all of our pre-set standards contained therein. The plot settings, LISP files, fonts, etc are located in the same location. We also utilize LISP and VBA to enforce the standardization.

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice.

Advantages:
Over the years CAD has increased the efficiency of creating design/fabrication/erection drawings. The ability to create a standard product block and ‘pop’ into our drawings allows for a more expeditious drawing creation. Furthermore, the ability to modify existing information for reuse has further simplified drawing creation.

Integration with Excel through VBA and the creation of ‘intelligent’ design models allows for the extraction of information that can be shared with non-CAD departments. By extracting information to Excel we can pass this on to our Purchasing department for virtually instantaneous purchase order creation and submittal.

Disadvantages:
The more powerful CAD becomes it consequently becomes more of a resource hog. It takes longer for drawings to open and edit information necessitating more powerful and faster computers. This is a trend I don’t see ending soon.

When I started on the board there was more of a thought process that went in to the design/drawing creation. For those that started that way it just carried over into the way they used CAD. Now I see schools and colleges turning out CAD operators rather than engineers/designers. Don’t get me wrong. I do know that there are very talented individuals that see CAD as a tool to further their skills rather than something to regurgitate someone else’s design through red line drafting. If it takes me more time to draw something up and give it to CAD operator to re-draw on the computer (sometimes multiple times.) than I could have drawn in CAD correctly the first time what have I saved by using CAD? Just an observation.

[Sammie]

Please give your name, general location and profession.

Samantha Hally, Lawton, Oklahoma, CAD Technician for the City of Lawton Sewer Systems Technical Division

How long have you been using AutoCAD?

5 years and going! :-)

When do you use CAD in the production process (i.e. preliminary design, design development, etc.)?

I mostly utilize cad for preliminary design. Otherwise, I use it for updating current drawings, ex. Citywide Sewer Maps, Water maps, etc...

What types of standardization do you use?

Custom Standardization

What advantages or disadvantages does CAD bring to your practice.

In our preliminary designs, a lot of changes are made, so being able to use cad allows quick changes to plans. Also when updating existing plan, cad makes things simpler to changes things quickly and accurately.

Happy to Help!!

Samantha