Rant: Stop using the wrong lineweights on your MEP plans

I spent 2 hours last Tuesday tracing a plumbing riser diagram because someone used the same lineweight for supply and drain lines. How hard is it to keep p-lines on one layer and waste on another?

3 comments

3 Comments

nguyen.tara18d ago

2 hours to trace a riser diagram because supply and drain lines looked exactly the same? That's brutal. I had a project last month where the structural grid and the fire sprinkler mains were both plotted at 0.18mm, spent half a day cross-checking before i realized what was going on. Some people just don't get that lineweights are not optional.

skylerp3117d ago

The AUGI forums had a thread a while back about a firm that standardized all their MEP lineweights to three settings (0.13mm, 0.25mm, and 0.50mm) and it supposedly cut their redline markups in half. I think that kind of clear layering is the bare minimum, but people still treat lineweights like they're optional decoration. Drives me nuts when a simple riser diagram turns into a detective game because someone couldn't be bothered to pick a different lineweight for waste pipes.

seth68315d ago

Did your firm consider enforcing lineweight standards through the drawing template files themselves? I've found that if you pre-set the plot styles and lock the layer states in the template, it takes away the excuse people use about forgetting to change them. What's stopping your office from baking those standards into the templates so nobody can accidentally override them?