If you are searching for a mechanical design drafter for machine building, you usually want to know how far such a partner goes: drafting only, or the design engineering as well. Our answer is short. We draft and model, and we do not do engineering. Calculations, design decisions and technical responsibility stay with you and your own engineers.
What we take over is the detailing: modelling parts, building assemblies, producing drawings, processing revisions and getting as-built material in order.
That is exactly the part that takes the most hours in machine building and is the hardest to plan. Sam, our team leader, still works as an engineer himself and leads the CAD team, so technical input lands quickly and little needs explaining. What is more, everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience. The work is done remotely from our own office, on our own licences and without anything needing to be set up on your side.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
Companies that bring in a mechanical design drafter for machine building
The companies that come to us are manufacturers, engineering firms, contractors and architectural practices, and more broadly organisations with technical drafting work. There is rarely a drafter at the table. It is managers, team leaders and owners who are responsible for a schedule and who notice that the drawing office can no longer keep pace. Their problem is almost always the same: capacity. There is too little time, there are too few drafters, or a peak is coming that their own team cannot get through without leaving other projects undone.
At a machine manufacturer, that often shows up as documentation that lags behind. A machine has been developed further, parts have been replaced and the drawings no longer match what is on the workshop floor. At an engineering firm, the situation is different. There, the design is finished or well advanced, but there is no time to detail it fully while the next assignment has already come in. A third situation occurs at a contractor or manufacturer running a large project, where the as-built documents only need bringing together at the end.
In every case, the question is not whether someone can draft, but whether extra hands can be added without your own team first losing time on recruitment and onboarding. We set up this service because a client asked for it last year. That went well, and since then we have offered it as a standard service to companies facing the same bottleneck. So what these clients ask for is not a judgement on their design, but the production of drafting work that needs to be finished.
Quality control of drafting work in machine building
Outsourced work has to be checkable, otherwise the problem simply shifts to your own work preparation team. That is why every drawing we produce goes through at least three review layers. A drafter creates the work, a second team member checks it, Sam then reviews it as team leader, and Barry, our project manager, gives the final assessment before it goes to you. Those layers do not all look at the same things. The first check focuses on the content of the drawing itself, meaning dimensions, structure, interfaces and whether the detailing matches what was supplied.
Sam also looks at the coherence within the set and at whether a sheet fits with the rest of the project. The final check looks at the whole, including naming, numbering and completeness of the delivery. As a result, errors hardly ever occur in practice. In machine building, that is no luxury, because a wrong dimension or a forgotten change only becomes visible once a part has already been ordered or milled. What the review also catches is the risk that comes with scaling up.
When several drafters work on the same set, small differences in style creep in without oversight and stand out later. So our review layers also test whether the work meets your drawing conventions. Errors we find ourselves are fixed before anything goes out. That saves you a review round you would otherwise have had to schedule yourself. What we deliberately do not do is pass the checking on to you by sending out a set with open points.
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.
The cost side of hiring a drafter in machine building
For this work, we use two forms, an hourly basis or a fixed price per project, and we make that choice together before the drafting begins. For hourly work, we only charge for actual working hours, meaning only time genuinely spent working. If someone steps away for five minutes for a coffee, that time does not appear on the timesheet. That makes a timesheet easy to follow and prevents discussions afterwards about what exactly was done in a day. A fixed project price is the obvious choice once the scope is clear in advance, for example with a clearly defined series of sheets or a well-described revision round on an existing machine. For work where the design is still changing, an hourly basis is fairer for both sides. What keeps costs down is the quality of the input. Complete information, a clear drafting manual and files that open without any detours save hours straight away.
Repetition works in your favour in the same way, because a series of variants of the same machine takes less time per sheet than a collection of separate tasks. In addition, a number of cost items disappear that always come with an in-house drafter. There are no ongoing salary costs, no workstation, no licences and no paid hours in a period without drafting work. If someone is ill or on holiday, we replace them, so you never pay for downtime. We do not work with prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription, because then what you buy is detached from what you really need. We only make an estimate after we have looked at the set supplied, because without that picture every figure remains an assumption.
How we differ from a freelancer or a permanent employee
The alternative to outsourcing is usually a freelancer or a new employee, and both have their own characteristics. A freelancer is available and can start quickly, but remains a single person. If they drop out through illness or another assignment, the drafting work stops and the search starts all over again. The checking of their work also comes back to your own team, because a single contractor checks their own work.
With us, that is different, because several people can work on the same set and multiple review layers go over it as standard. A permanent employee is a different consideration. That choice works well for structural volume that is closely tied to your own product knowledge, but it brings a recruitment process, an onboarding period and then ongoing costs, including in months with little drafting work.
In machine building, that volume is rarely even, because orders and projects come in waves. We meet that with a large, variable team that is already in place and scales up or down per project. There is no recruitment time between the request and the first drawing, and if it is urgent we add people straight away.
That does not mean every situation lends itself to outsourcing. Work that is discussed around the table every day and changes constantly is better kept in-house. We say so when that is how we see it, because a badly divided assignment costs both parties time. We would rather discuss that trade-off openly at the start than have it cause friction halfway through the project.
Frequently asked questions about a mechanical design drafter for machine building
Hand your machine building drafting over 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.