drafting in high school was easy but i started work today for a small engineering firm and the plans i was copying to autocad from paper were alot more confusing than tha high school ones. Does anyone have a site plan i could study to learn all of the symbols and how to read the dimensions. Any help would be greatly appriciated.
First rule of employment: Understand the nature of the work you will be doing, unless of course you think you will find all the answers on a news group.
"doane_nut" wrote in news:45f9d363$0$17003$ snipped-for-privacy@roadrunner.com:
Second rule of employment : Ask. And keep on asking. You don't say where your work is located, but in most countries there are established standards for technical drawing, and someone in your workplace will (or should) know what they are :-) Standards usually cover plan dimensions (paper sizes), dimensioning of drawings, units, minimum lettering size, standard symbols, common abbreviations, what should be on title blocks etc. The stuff in your workplace may be personalised to the organisation, but should still comply with the standard.
At my first CAD job, I had to sign a letter that said I was always going to comply with the extensive and well documented company cad standards manual. Still, I found many situation that the standards did not seem to cover, so I would ask the CAD priestess what I should do in EVERY one of these situations, no matter how small. I feared that I was risking being a PITA, but I signed this letter that said if I deviated from the protocol, I'd have to make it good on my own time. I figured if they were going to insist on having it a certain way, then they owed me an explanation of what they wanted.
They soon came to the conclusion that I was not your typical CAD cowboy, which was the most common problem for them, and these were not stupid questions I was asking. I quickly earned their respect as a draftsman, and then as a CAD operator, and they soon even gave me special dispensation to modify their protocol on a complex job I was doing alone. I wanted to try this thing called "paperspace", as it seemed to have a bunch of advantages.
If the OP is straight out of high school, it's safe to assume that they are not paying him to know everything already, and unless he's misrepresented himself to get the job, the employer should have to expect questions while such an inexperience pup gets up to speed. Ask away!
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