I finally admitted that I miss hand-drafting details

Everyone says CAD is the only way to go now, but I think we lost something with the precision of pencil and paper. The physical touch helped me spot errors that I sometimes miss on screen.

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3 Comments

mason_flores6mo ago

How do you handle detail checks now? I mean, I had the same issue when I switched over fully to CAD. What works for me is printing a section out at full scale and going over it with a red pen, just like I used to. There's something about marking up a physical page that makes problems jump out. I still do a quick sketch by hand sometimes to figure out a tricky connection before I model it. Maybe try mixing both, like doing your first pass on paper?

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theabennett6mo ago

Printing full scale? That seems like overkill.

7

the_shane6mo ago

Yeah, a buddy of mine swears by printing his sheets for a final check, kind of like what @mason_flores said. He caught a major footing error just holding the paper up to the site light that he'd scanned over a dozen times on screen. Sometimes the old ways just give you a different angle.

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