Requests for a technical drafter on a project basis rarely come out of nowhere. There is a peak in the drawing office, a deadline that cannot move, or a vacancy that has been open for months without a suitable drafter applying. Meanwhile, the work carries on and the revisions pile up.
We then step in for the duration of the project and no longer. Our team is already in place, so we do not need to start a recruitment process before the first drawing gets under way.
We deliver 2D drafting, 3D modelling where needed, as-built drawings and revision rounds on existing sets. We do not do engineering; we draft and model based on the starting points you supply. Everyone who works on a project with us has more than ten years of experience with CAD, and Sam, our team leader, keeps the technical line consistent. As soon as the project is finished, our involvement stops and you keep the complete set under your own control.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
An as-built file we straightened out on a project basis
For Firefly we were supplied with as-built material that was not clean in any respect. The existing drawings had been printed incorrectly, parts had been drawn over by hand and the whole thing was hard to read. A file like that first needs organising and only then drafting. We went through the material, reconstructed the logic of the existing work and worked out for ourselves what it said, rather than calling the client every day with individual questions. Whatever we could not deduce, we bundled and presented in one go. We then still delivered the set neatly.
We took two lessons from that project. The first is that a messy source is no reason to wait: we usually get further by working things out logically than with a long list of questions. The second is that checking matters more the poorer the source is. Every component goes through at least three review layers with us, with a second team member checking the drafting, Sam assessing it technically as team leader and Barry, our project manager, carrying out the final check. On this type of work, that catches the errors that would otherwise only show up during construction.
We have now completed more than twenty projects and delivered hundreds of drawings for this client. That volume illustrates exactly what we are for: ongoing production work that an in-house drawing office cannot simply absorb. We delivered that work in stages, each time with feedback before we moved on. That kept the client informed without anyone having to spend time on it every day. For a file that comes in messy, that rhythm matters more than speed alone.
What we deliver with a technical drafter on a project basis
Our work starts with the type of drawing the project requires. We produce floor plans, facades, sections, typical details, construction details, grid plans, opening drawings and piping schematics. We also draft production and part drawings for manufacturers, with the associated dimensions and annotations. Where a project calls for a model, we model in 3D and derive the drawings from it, so a change does not have to be repeated in twenty separate files. We process as-built drawings based on survey material, photos or mark-ups on existing prints that you supply. Revision rounds make up a large part of our work: we bring an existing DWG that no longer matches after a change on site back in line with reality.
In terms of output, we deliver DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice any common CAD format. We draft in Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, supplemented by Inventor and Grasshopper, and to a limited extent Dynamo and Vault. We prefer to be clear straight away about what we do not do. We do not produce structural calculations, give structural advice or handle permits. Our contribution is the drawing and the model, carried out according to the starting points you supply. That division works well in practice, because the firm keeps responsibility for the content while we clear the drafting volume.
It also makes the size of an assignment easier to estimate fairly, because we only budget drafting hours and no advisory work. For a series of similar drawings we put several drafters to work in parallel, while for a closely connected set we use a small fixed team. Which set-up fits is decided by the number of drawings, the amount of repetition and the date by which the set must be complete. We present that choice to you at the start of the project.
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.
What the delivered set contains for project-based work
We deliver source files, not flattened prints your own team cannot do anything with. You receive the DWGs or Revit files themselves, with the layers, blocks and families as they belong within the project. That allows your drawing office to move straight on to the next stage, whether that is a construction phase, a tender or another revision round. We deliver in stages, not all at once at the end. The first part goes to you early, so your project leader can assess our approach while there is still room to adjust course. We process feedback and carry it through to the rest of the set, so a correction does not come back drawing by drawing. We keep file names and drawing numbers the way you use them, including the system for revision letters and dates. With a model, we make sure the structure stays logical, because a model that only we can make sense of has little value for what follows.
If the project calls for a material schedule, we link it to the model components, so a change to a component automatically feeds through to the schedule. The intellectual property belongs to you. After delivery, you therefore keep a set that can be maintained independently, even if a subsequent phase goes ahead without us. We also include a short explanation of the choices we made along the way, for example about the structure of a recurring detail or the naming of a new layer. That explanation usually fits on half a page and saves searching for the colleague who picks up the file later. We see the handover as part of the work, not as a final extra that gets tacked on.
Our drafters work to your CAD standards and layer structure
We do not apply a house style of our own to the drafting; we adopt yours. At the start of a project we ask for your CAD standards, a sample drawing and the existing template. From these we take the layer structure, lineweights, hatching, text sizes, symbols and the way dimension lines are set up. We also adopt title blocks and drawing numbering exactly as they are.
If there is no documented standard, we reconstruct it from the existing work and present our assumptions before we start on the volume. That takes half an hour at the start and prevents a correction round across the entire set later on. In Revit, we look at the families and templates that are already there.
We can clean up a family set that is clogged with variants and duplicate parameters, but sometimes we prefer to rebuild a component, because repairing it would take more time than starting afresh. We judge which route is sensible based on the state of the existing set and present it to you first. We draft in our own environment with our own licences, not in your system. That saves you accounts, workstations and administration.
Files are exchanged by email, and on larger projects such as greenhouse construction we work in software you can log into to follow progress. If the standard changes during the project, for example because your own client imposes a requirement, we apply that change across the whole set rather than only to the new drawings. Such adjustments cost little at the start of a project and a lot at the end, so we flag them straight away.
Frequently asked questions about a technical drafter on a project basis
Hand your project 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.