If you are looking for a CAD drafter on a self-employed basis, the first thing you usually check is the software the work has to be done in. That is a fair question, because a drafter who knows AutoCAD but not the Revit structure of a project delivers work that still has to be converted later.
The emphasis of our work lies in Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino. We also use Inventor and Grasshopper, and to a limited extent Dynamo and Vault. Always on the latest versions, in our own environment and with our own licences, so no workstations or accounts need to be set up on your side.
We exchange files in DXF, DWG, the Revit formats and STEP files, and in practice in any common CAD format. We are OutsourceCAD, and we draft and model for companies that lack drafting capacity. We do not do engineering. The work is carried out entirely remotely from our own office, for clients in the Netherlands who are temporarily or structurally short of drafting capacity.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
From enquiry to delivery with a self-employed CAD drafter
It starts with a conversation. We reply to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days, after which we go through the project and ask which documents are available. Barry, our project manager, is the point of contact for that first enquiry, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side. In most cases you supply existing drawings that need revising, together with the details and drawing conventions. Once the information is complete, we can get to work. We then deliver in stages rather than all at once at the end. That is a deliberate choice, because a difference in interpretation that shows up in the first five drawings costs a fraction of the same difference in drawing one hundred.
You give feedback on that first part, we process it and carry on with the next batch. We agree the rhythm of meetings in advance, and it varies per client: every two days with a tight schedule, weekly on a calmer project. For standalone AutoCAD assignments, we exchange files by email. On large projects, greenhouse construction projects for example, we use an environment you can log into yourself to follow along.
Day-to-day contact runs through email, phone and meetings, and we visit you or welcome you at our office. Whereas hiring a self-employed CAD drafter usually requires day-to-day management from within your own organisation, with us that management is handled internally. Sam divides the work and safeguards the technical line, so your project leader only has to respond to the content, not to the planning of individual drafters.
An as-built file that had to be redrawn
For Firefly we have completed more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings. One of those projects illustrates what we come across in revision work. The as-built material supplied consisted of drawings that had been printed incorrectly and partly amended by hand. Parts were hard to read, the structure was messy and the changes had not been applied consistently. There were two possible routes.
The first was to call the client about every unclear point, which would have slowed the project down and taken up the time of exactly the people who had outsourced the work. The second was to work out for ourselves how it all fitted together. We chose the second route, unpicked the material and still delivered it neatly. That takes experience, because recognising what was once intended in a half hand-amended drawing does not come automatically. Everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and together the core of the team has around twenty-five years of experience.
What we take from this into future assignments is mainly the order of work. First go through all the source material and bundle the unclear points, and only then start drafting. Separate questions trickling in over weeks cost more time than one well-prepared list of questions. For a client weighing up a self-employed CAD drafter against a team, this is often where the difference lies: not in the drafting itself, but in how much supervision the messy material requires and who takes on that detective work without having to keep coming back about it.
No ongoing payroll costs and no idle staff once the peak is over. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work simply carries on.
CAD standards and layer structure for a self-employed CAD drafter
We work to your CAD standards and drawing conventions. You supply them and we follow them, even if we have a different habit ourselves. This covers layer structure and layer names, title blocks, hatching, line weights, text sizes, file naming and the way revisions are tracked and marked. In a series this matters more than for a single drawing, because a deviation multiplies across hundreds of files and only becomes noticeable when someone further down the chain opens the set. If part of the conventions is missing, we raise the question rather than making a choice ourselves that later turns out not to fit. Sometimes there is a standard, but it exists only in the heads of your own drafters. In that case, we work from a reference drawing and have that choice confirmed in the first part.
With a mixed project file in which part has been set up in AutoCAD and part in Revit, we agree in advance which part is leading. For clients who have worked with a self-employed CAD drafter before, this is usually the familiar pain point. A good drafter delivers technically correct drawings that simply do not match the rest of the project file, after which your own team still has to convert them. That takes time that was not in the quotation. That is why we handle this alignment at the start and record what we will follow, so the set stays consistent as a whole and the intellectual property reaches you in a usable form.
Quality control when hiring a self-employed CAD drafter
Work that leaves our office has been checked at least three times. The drafter produces the drawing, a second team member checks that work, then Sam reviews it and finally Barry goes over the whole package once more. This set-up exists because repetitive drafting is prone to small, systematic deviations. A layer with a different name in one drawing, a block updated in half the series, a revision mark missing on a number of sheets.
Such things are technically minor but cost a lot of time further down the line, especially if they are only found in production or on site. Because several pairs of eyes go over the work, the number of errors stays minimal in practice.
That is the part that, when hiring a self-employed CAD drafter, usually stays with you. The hired drafter delivers and the checking shifts to your own drawing office, so part of the capacity gain evaporates again. With us, that checking is built into the process and is not charged separately. The steps also stay in place on urgent work. When there was a deadline that could not move, we worked through evenings and weekends with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, but the review line was not dropped.
Meeting a deadline with a set that then has to be corrected gives you nothing, after all. If you want to see how that checking works out on your own material, you can judge it with a defined first series without anything being fixed for the long term.
Frequently asked questions about a CAD drafter on a self-employed basis
Let us take on your CAD drafting
Send us your documents and drawing conventions and we will let you know within one to two working days what we can take on and when.