About one year ago at work I started work on a project to install a new packing machine where I work.
In my usual carefree fashion, I organised one drawing to do this. Even though I had my newly developed lisp routine to turn on the stuff on the ground floor and freeze the levels above, it proved cumbersome, especially as I was unable at the time to use my favourite: SECTIONPLANE. At one stage, I even created a new empty drawing and xreffed the main drawing into it and used 3DCLIP to get a clearer idea of what was going on.
In the beginning, it was "only" a proposal, so all this was not really that critical. All that mattered was "Would it fit, and in what configuration." Now this is a full on project, things are a lot more critical: you have to know where everything is, and what all clearances are to ensure no surprises on judgement day.
I noticed the engineer in charge did not seem all that happy with the drawings, in that it was hard to visualise some parts due to the fact that some things hide other things, so I have decided to rethink my strategy.
We are now going to have a drawing for each machine, and they will be xreffed into a main drawing which will be mostly just a floor with a reference point in it. Walls and doors will be on one drawing, steelwork on another.
The machine drawings will be in 3D and have all their views, dimensions and annotations in paper space.
Now I am able to use the sectionplane command, there will be one drawing that shows sections, by xreffing in the main drawing to it.
