Help with working in the metric system

[drafting.82475]

Hello All,

I just moved from the US to work in the UK, since here they use the metric system on all the drawings, I was wondering if there is any publications available to help me out on this transition. I am looking for not only plotting issues but also on settings for templates on different scales (text height, dimscale, ltscale etc.).
I really appreciate any help.

Cheers,

Jaime Silva

[lmitsou]

Hello All,

I just moved from the US to work in the UK, since here they use the metric system on all the drawings, I was wondering if there is any publications available to help me out on this transition. I am looking for not only plotting issues but also on settings for templates on different scales (text height, dimscale, ltscale etc.).
I really appreciate any help.

Cheers,

Jaime Silva

Hi Jaime,

Here is a doc. with scale charts both metric and imperial. I have found this in AUGI forums quite some time ago but I can't remember which forum or who wrote it. All credits to the author.

Thanks,

[Mike.Perry]

Hi

Take a look at the following information...

Imperial to Metric Creating Templates and work process.....

TIPniques: Mind the Gap - September 2005 (http://www.augi.com/publications/hotnews.asp?page=920)

Sept '05 - TIPniques: Mind the Gap

TIPniques: The Power of Page Setups - October 2005 (http://www.augi.com/publications/hotnews.asp?page=946)

Oct '05 - TIPniques: Power of Page Setups

Have a good one, Mike

[drafting.82475]

Thank you all for the replies, I really appreciate it.
It is funny that all my life I lived under the metric system, since I was born in Portugal and grew up in Brazil, but all my AutoCAD experience is from the US (last 10 years) and now I have to go back and refresh everything. I thought it was going to be easier.
Cheers

Jaime

[cordination]

In February 2007, I offer a class on AUGI's ATP, that will cover many, hopefully most, issue around metric and imperial. I just did some research in the user forum and am finishing the course script now. Hope to see you there!
Cord

[jgratton]

I grew up with imperial units until Canada converted to metric when I was a teenager. Now I work in the oil business which means we measure in metric but call out ANSI pipe sizes in inches!

The best tips I can give you is make sure any new drawings you create use a metric dwt as their seed file. Vanilla Autocad setups default to acad.dwt instead of acadiso.dwt, for example. Second handy tip I would pass along is to keep your drawings unitless as much as possible. That way when you drag and drop from the design center, there is no conversion factor applied. Just like in the old days before paperspace came along, AutoCAD never cared about what 1 unit represented. Here we plot our paperspace to ANSI sized paper because that is our standard stock paper size, even though our client's titleblocks are A1. Sounds weird but hey, we're Canadian! One foot in America, the other in Europe. Third tip, do what everyone else is doing, at least until you are sure they welcome new ideas. When in Rome...(or in your case, Wales) ;)