Saturday, December 18, 2021

The Angry Draftsman and a Door Plan View Never Seen Before on the Internet!

 Maybe it is because I have just spent 77 hours on a framing job (3 different houses, one set of drawings) that ended up with about 62 panels drawn.

One thing as an architectural draftsman I would do when drawing interior doors would be to just slam them in the corner of a room, with no precision about 100mm away from the framing, not bothering to show the door frame details at all.  Which works out ok as the precut man will put things in to make it work in reality.

The problem was: now I was that man!  The drawings I received, were done by someone, who like me, lived in a little drafting la la land.....so we have cupboard doors that are much narrower. Doors that will not fit in the available corridor space......so how to get a bed into the bedroom?

Which is fine, who cares?  Except when you need to put a hot water cylinder in.....or get a bed in a bedroom...



The thing which I never really took on board is that to have a door, you need a lintel.  This needs 2 studs, one to go from top to bottom, and one to support the lintel, that is if this wall needs to butt into another one.  So the soonest the gap can start is 45 + 45 away from the other wall, ie 90mm.  Then you have the door frame to consider and a gap at the other end.

>>>>>July 2024 note: see below, the 90mm can be 45mm<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Easy, I thought, just go on the net and look up door manufacturers.  The number of different door frame options out there is eye watering.  No nice plan views as shown here though. Hence the anger.

If you can see anything obvious wrong, please comment.

In my early architectural drawings I always made all doors the same size, 760mm.  After about 5 drawings the architect noticed this and informed me that bathrooms and toilets were supposed to be 710mm.  

NEW NOTES MADE 24 JULY 2023.

I have had occasion today to make a lisp routine to insert doors and revisited the dimensions given above.

I found a firm called J & G Doors Ltd, at https://jgdoors.co.nz/technical-info/

and their figuring is at odds with mine.  Seeing as that is their business to make doors, I have to 

bow to their superior wisdom. So the above sketches should appear as revised below:



Just to add to the confusion, the apartment where I live has dimensions where 70 shown above

turns out to be 85-90mm, so the jury is still out!  It seems common practice to just have 1 x 90x45

against the adjacent wall, so the idea of 2  45x90's promoted above is probably suspect as well!

From here on I am working on 45mm only not 90mm.

My comment when asked to do some pre-cut drawings was: "How hard could it be?"

Turns out, hard work.  Little things like where do you put the first stud?  No books to guide me I settled eventually on 610mm, on the grounds that you need to allow for the gib on the adjoining wall. Fingers crossed this is ok!

Regarding angry draftsmen, I have noticed that Architects and Architectural Draftsmen are quite often grumpy people.  Maybe it is dealing with clients and council that brings this on.  Or is it that drawing houses is rife with things that are plainly a silly way to do things, for instance, every one has a different set of drawn details. Still, maybe it keeps us all in a job?









Saturday, September 4, 2021

Down Autocad memory Lane

Around 1991,  I remember spending $2400 on an AT, IBM clone, it had a 80286 processor and probably 1k of ram....My daughter and and I used to play Captain Comic on it.

It had a 14" Colour monitor, not flat screen but cathode ray tube.

About 1993, I decided to go contract drafting and bought a copy of Autocad 12 for NZ$6500.  I got a man to upgrade it to an 80386, still with not much ram.  

I could draw things ok, but a bunch of 2D pipes in a factory, and it would give up.

One of my first jobs was for an engineering consultancy specializing in rendering.
No, not as in producing pretty pictures, but dealing with slaughtered animal wastes.

Everything was all 2D, as the computers then did not have the power to do 3D.

Release 14 which came out in 1997 had some handy 3D capability, just as computers became more powerful, and I became more convinced and proficient with 3D.

What followed was a succession of contracts here and there, which were all good learning experiences, until I ended up at a large factory where I more or less stayed until I retired.

With a few breaks to work on other things.

Autocad 2007 I remember as the really ground breaking release, for the extra 3D pieces which it had in it.