If 'drafting partner wanted' is on your drawing office's to-do list, it helps to be clear first about what that partner should and should not do. We draft and model, and that is where it ends. We do not produce calculations, we do not give structural advice, we do not handle permits and we do not take over engineering responsibility.
What we do provide is 2D drafting, 3D modelling where needed, as-built drawings and revisions, often in high volume and with a lot of repetition.
Our drafters all have more than ten years of CAD experience, and Sam, our team leader, directs the technical side. We fit in with the set that already exists, in your format and following your conventions. We carry out the work remotely from our own office, with our own licences. We respond to a request within 1 to 2 working days, after which we go through the project calmly. Our large, flexible team scales with each assignment, depending on the volume and the schedule.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
What a drafting partner actually delivers with us
The focus of our work is 2D drafting. Think of floor plans, sections, elevations, standard details, piping schematics and production drawings that are small individually but add up in number. We also model in 3D when the project calls for it, for example because you want to extract elevations and quantities from a model. As-built drawings are a category of their own. There, we receive existing material, sometimes an old print or a file partly drawn by hand, and turn it into a digital set that is correct. Revisions are perhaps the most common work we take on.
A set of existing DWGs that no longer matches reality after changes on site has to be checked, adjusted and reissued. We like working in series, because that is where our strength lies. Carrying through twenty variants of the same component is routine for us, whereas it costs an in-house drawing office days it would rather spend on the ongoing design. What we do not do, we deliberately repeat: no engineering, no structural decisions, no strength calculations. If doubts arise about a design criterion during drafting, we put that question back to you instead of writing down an assumption ourselves.
If you are looking for a drafting partner for the production side, you get capacity and precision from us. If you are looking for someone who also comes up with the design, we are not the right firm, and we would rather say so straight away. The advantage of that sharp boundary is that the division of roles in a project stays clear. You decide what needs to be there; we make sure it ends up correctly and quickly on paper or in the model.
Software, versions and formats from your drafting partner
Our main packages are Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino. We also work in Inventor and Grasshopper, and to a limited extent in Dynamo and Vault. We keep these packages on the latest versions, so a file we send back does not first have to go through a conversion step. If your firm deliberately runs an older version, we would like to know in advance and will deliver in that version. Supply and delivery can be in DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format.
More important than the list of file extensions is how we fit in with an existing set. We first open the material supplied and look at how it is built up: which blocks it contains, how the xrefs run, which families are in use and where the previous drafter departed from their own structure. Only then do our drafters start. That step takes a few hours and prevents us from building a parallel structure alongside the existing one, which would later cost you double the work. If the existing set is very messy, we say so and put the choice to you: clean it up or rebuild it.
Both are possible, and sometimes rebuilding is faster than repairing. We work in our own environment with our own licences, not on your servers, so no workstation or access needs to be arranged. For a drafting partner, that is the least a drawing office can expect. If a project switches software halfway through, for example from AutoCAD to Revit, we first discuss what that means for the existing set. A conversion without a plan almost always creates more clean-up work than time savings.
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.
A drafting partner that works to your CAD standards and layer structure
We do not have a house standard of our own that we slip into clients' work. We work to the client's standard and drawing conventions, and we receive those from you. Specifically, that covers the layer structure and layer names, line weights, hatches, text sizes, title blocks, file names and the numbering of details and revisions. We go through these points at the start, so our drafters do not introduce their own habits halfway through. If there is no document setting out the conventions, we derive them from the drawings we receive and put our assumptions to you for confirmation. That is usually a matter of half a page of questions, and the investment pays for itself. A set that is technically correct but departs from the house conventions still costs the drawing office a day of cleaning up, and then outsourcing defeats its purpose.
That is why, when checking, we look not only at the content but also at the structure. Is everything on the right layer, are the block references correct, do the revision clouds and stamps follow what was agreed? If the standard changes during a longer project, we adjust the ongoing work and tell you which drawings already delivered we will go back over. Anyone looking for a drafting partner is essentially looking for someone who fits into the existing process. That is exactly what we focus on. If a firm has never documented its conventions, our inventory immediately produces a useful by-product. The list of conventions we draw up at the start can then be used by the firm itself with other external parties. We simply share that list, because it belongs to the project and not to us.
What is in the set your drafting partner delivers
We deliver the source files, not just a PDF output. That means you can carry on yourself without remaining dependent on us, which fits the principle that the intellectual property of our work belongs to you. For an AutoCAD assignment, that means the DWGs including the blocks and xrefs used, in the folder structure we agreed. For Revit, we deliver the model with the families we created or modified, so your firm can reuse them in a future project.
Where useful, we add a short note on the choices we made and the points where we made an assumption. That list is often the first thing your project leader looks at.
We deliver in batches. The first batch deliberately goes out early, so we can process the feedback on it in the rest of the set before a deviation repeats itself a hundred times. For standalone AutoCAD drafting, that exchange runs by email. On larger projects, such as greenhouse construction projects, we use software you can log into to follow progress. At the end, the set goes through our final completeness check, after which we hand it over in one go.
A drafting partner is only finished when the next stage of the process can run without rework, and that is what we aim for. If a question comes up after handover about a choice we made, we simply deal with it. That is part of the job and we do not make a fuss about it. We can also pick up whatever changes come in a next round, because we know how the set is built.
Drafting partner wanted: frequently asked questions
Looking for a drafting partner? Talk to us
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.