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Combining Drawings
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Combining Drawings
This probably doesn’t apply to many of you but I thought I’d share something that not only saves me time but also money too.
For new housing schemes I get sent a lot of drawings – one job recently was in excess of 700 drawings.
These initially need sorting as for measuring Brickwork & Scaffolding I don’t need things like heating layouts, kitchen plans, etc. I was left with just under 500 drawings for that job.
I then need to have a set of drawings printed for the guys on site but often A3 drawings are required instead of the ‘designed’ sizes of A2 or A1.
First thing I do is to use Combine to make one complete set.
I can then quickly ‘flick’ through the drawings and delete the ones that I don’t need – this is so much easier than waiting for a preview to come up on Windows Explorer or opening each drawing.
I then email off the drawings to a reprographics company so they can print and post the drawings – this is where the money saving comes in. As well as paying for printing each drawing they also charge for reducing drawings from their original size e.g. A1 to A3. This is £0.49p per drawing so can become rather expensive! However, I can just send them the one file of 500 drawings and ask them to print that at A3 so I pay the fee just once – saving nearly £250 in this case!
Somehow I don’t think Bluebeam was designed with this in mind but it certainly works for me! 😃
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4 Replies
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Points: 26,754Rank: UC2 Brainery Advanced Brown Belt
That’s a great timesaving and cost saving idea Vince!
I’m a fan of having one file with all of the sheets in it as I find it easiest to scroll through the pages. Brings me back to my younger days when you could page through a set of plans and tab them up with sticky notes I guess.
While I’ve seen a number of discussions about using “Sets” in Revu, I haven’t really explored the topic extensively yet. I think that Sets would work for you for eliminating your heating layouts in your example, and, if my understanding is correct it may not slow down your computer as much when dealing with 700 pages.
At the end of the day the real question is if your printing company is savvy enough to print a set and will they do so at the same price as a 500 page single PDF. If not, maybe you need to introduce them to @uchapter2 …
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Points: 13,687Rank: UC2 Brainery Blue Belt III
Hi David. I have tried using Sets but unfortunately I just haven’t been able to get it to work for me and have given up on that.
Basically, I am unable to get Bluebeam to label up all of the drawings properly because there appears to be no consistency in the placing of title blocks, rev no’s, etc and that is even when it is the same Engineer or Architect has produced the drawings. Throw into the mix specialists, structural engineers, civil engineers, architects, etc and everything just becomes a complete mess.
Hopefully Bluebeam will fine tune things at their end to sort some of these issues out.
In the meantime I have developed a spreadsheet which uses Power Query to produce a drawing register. Basically, I keep all of the drawings in dated sub-folders as the revisions come through. Power Query produces the register based on the contents of all the files. The file name is then hyperlinked so if I want to open a drawing then all I have to do is click on the name. Hope that makes sense!
With regards the printers – I don’t think it would be wise to complicate things any further for them! 😆
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Points: 23,744Rank: UC2 Brainery Brown Belt III
shouldn’t everyone be introduced to UC2? 😂🤣
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Points: 13,687Rank: UC2 Brainery Blue Belt III
Not if I want to get drawings to the guys on-site within the next year or so!
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