When a drawing office needs a 2D drafter for a peak, the conversation with us usually starts with costs. We charge by the hour or a fixed price per project, and we decide together with you which option fits. On an hourly basis we only bill genuine working hours.
If one of our drafters steps away for five minutes for a coffee, the clock stops. That sounds minor, but over a revision round of hundreds of sheets it makes a noticeable difference. With us you pay no ongoing salary costs and no idle time between two projects.
If someone drops out through illness or holiday, we bring in a replacement and the work carries on. We work without prepaid hour bundles or a monthly subscription, so the billing stops after the last drawing. If you would rather have certainty about the amount up front, we give you a fixed project price as soon as we know the documents and the scope. A short job is fine, including as a first introduction to our speed.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
An as-built file that needed a 2D drafter
Firefly supplied us with an as-built file in which the existing drawings had been printed incorrectly and partly added to by hand. The scale was not correct everywhere, lines ran into each other and on some of the sheets there was pencil over the print. Material like that needs a 2D drafter who does not pick up the phone at every ambiguity. We worked it out ourselves, reconstructed the logic in the existing set and only consulted the client when there was a genuine choice to be made on their side.
That saved the project leader at the other end dozens of interruptions a week. In the end we still delivered the file neatly in digital form, in a structure the Firefly team could work with straight away. We have now completed more than twenty projects and delivered hundreds of drawings for this client, and a large share of them fell into the same category: existing material we had to rebuild. We apply what we learned from that to every subsequent revision round.
We read through the whole set before anyone starts drafting, we record the discrepancies in one place and we raise them in a single meeting rather than sheet by sheet. When in doubt, we would rather put a note on the drawing than silently process an assumption. That shortens the checking afterwards and prevents an error from travelling along to the next revision. When a deadline on that same project could not move, our team worked evenings and weekends to hit the date.
What our 2D drafter delivers
We deliver 2D drafting work in AutoCAD and, if you work in it, 2D output from Revit as well. Specifically, that means floor plans, sections, elevations, detail sheets, standard details, grid plans, opening drawings and piping schematics. We also draft revisions to existing sets and work up as-built material into a complete digital set. If you need a 2D drafter for production drawings or part drawings, you can come to us for that too, because we draw them up in the structure that manufacturing requires. We do the drafting and the modelling, not the engineering.
Calculations, structural advice and permit procedures stay with your own firm. We deliver the output in DWG and DXF, in Revit formats when the model needs to go there, and in STEP when a manufacturer continues working with it. In practice every common CAD format passes through our hands. We draft in our own environment with our own licences and always on the latest versions, so you do not need to arrange a workstation, a licence or access to your own network. The volume is often high and the work repetitive: a hundred variants of the same detail, a series of sheets that all receive the same change, a piping schematic in which the same valve in 90 and 110 keeps recurring.
That is exactly where the gain from outsourcing lies, because our team handles that kind of series as a matter of routine. We split large jobs into blocks and deliver per block, so the project leader can see early on whether the direction is right. We agree in advance exactly what goes into each block, based on the drawing list. The intellectual property rights to everything we draw belong to the client.
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 set delivered by a hired 2D drafter
The set we deliver contains more than just the drawing itself. We supply the source drawing in the format you continue working in, with the layers, blocks and title blocks your own set already uses. We keep xrefs neatly linked and mirror the folder structure to the client's, so nobody has to go searching after delivery. With a revision, we supply not only the amended sheets but also an overview of what we changed on each sheet, with a reference to the comment the change came from. That lets a checker review the set without laying the old and new versions side by side. If you need a 2D drafter on a live project, what matters most is that the delivery can be used immediately for the next step. That is why we deliver in stages: a first block, feedback, adjustments and on to the next block.
That keeps the number of corrections per round small and lets the project leader see early on whether our interpretation is correct. For standalone drafting, files go back and forth by email. On larger projects, such as the greenhouse construction projects we run, we work with software that you can log into to follow progress per component. We adjust the meeting rhythm accordingly: when it is urgent we meet every two days, on a calmer project weekly. After delivery your own team picks up the set without a conversion step, because we have drafted in their structure from the very first sheet. If another change comes in after that, we handle it in the same set.
The client's CAD standards and layer structure
We work to the client's drawing conventions, not to a house style of our own. You provide those standards: the layer scheme, line weights, hatching, text sizes, the naming of files and sheets, and the way dimensions and references are placed on the sheet. If there is no document setting this out, we derive the rules from an existing set that you point to as a good example and put our findings to you for confirmation.
That takes an hour or so at the start and prevents us from completing a whole series of sheets in the wrong structure. We then stick to those conventions, even if one of our drafters has a different habit.
The work then passes through at least three review layers. A drafter draws, a second team member checks that work sheet by sheet, then Sam, our team leader, reviews the technical side and Barry, our project manager, goes over it last. Sam has well over fifteen years of background in architecture, worked in Iran for seven years, ran his own design practice in the Netherlands and still works as an engineer alongside this.
Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, so picking up a client's standards is routine for us. Thanks to that setup the number of errors stays to a minimum in practice and the client's drawing office does not have to act as a fourth checker. If the standards change partway through a project, we update the sheets in progress and record from which block the new convention applies.
Frequently asked questions when you need a 2D drafter
Need a 2D drafter? Hand the work 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.