If you are looking for a timber frame CAD drafter, you are usually in a hurry, because a series of panel drawings is waiting while your own drawing office is already filling up. Lead time is then the real issue, not the job advert. We take over drafting work from our own office, with our large, flexible team that scales with each project.
Those people are already in place, so nobody needs to be recruited and no months are lost to onboarding. When it is urgent, we add drafters straight away to work that is already under way.
We draft and model, nothing more. Engineering, calculations and structural advice fall outside what we do, and we would rather make that clear up front than afterwards. Where we make the difference is the high-volume, highly repetitive part, precisely the part that brings a busy drawing office to a standstill. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days, after which we go through what is on the table and when it needs to be finished in a conversation.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
What we produce as a timber frame CAD drafter
The focus is on 2D drafting. We produce floor plans, sections, elevations and detail drawings, and develop panel drawings to the level at which production can work with them. Where a project calls for it, we model in 3D, so the drawings come from a model rather than existing separately side by side. As-built drawings are part of this too, as are revision rounds on sets that have been in use for some time and have become cluttered along the way. A timber frame CAD drafter who starts on a file with us does not draw according to their own preferences, but to the client's drawing conventions and standards.
We receive those conventions, including title blocks, layer structure and naming, and we do not deviate from them. The output leaves our office in DXF, DWG, Revit formats and STEP, and in practice in any common CAD format used further down the chain. We work in Revit, AutoCAD and Rhino, supplemented by Inventor and Grasshopper and, to a lesser extent, Dynamo and Vault. We always do so in the latest versions, in our own environment and with our own licences.
We tackle repetitive work parametrically wherever possible. A component that recurs in several sizes is built once as a smart component, after which the material schedule follows every change in the model. What we deliberately do not do is engineering. We do not do calculations, give structural advice or handle permits. The focus remains drafting and modelling, and the intellectual property of everything we deliver belongs to the client.
Clients who bring in a timber frame CAD drafter
Enquiries come from engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly from companies with technical drafting work in-house. The people we talk to are managers, team leads and owners, people who see the schedule up close and know which week is going to be tight. The trigger is almost always capacity. There are too few hours available, too few drafters, or a peak the in-house team cannot possibly take on. What gets left behind then is rarely the complex design work.
It is the repetitive part: yet another variant of a wall build-up, carrying a change through dozens of sheets, the set that has to be gone through completely after an amendment. That is exactly where we deploy a timber frame CAD drafter, or as many drafters from our large team as needed, without the client building up ongoing salary costs. If one of our people drops out due to illness or holidays, we replace that person and the work carries on. That is a fundamental difference from an employee of your own, who may also fall ill during a peak. Our clients are in the Netherlands, and that is where our focus lies too.
We carry out the work entirely remotely, which means a client does not have to free up a workstation, licence or hardware. If you would rather get to know our way of working first, start with a small job. A short job is fine, and it immediately gives you an honest picture of speed and accuracy before a larger package is handed over. In practice, a few sheets are enough to show whether the collaboration fits the pace of your own drawing office.
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.
Working with a timber frame CAD drafter, from first conversation to delivery
The project starts with a conversation in which we go through the job. The client supplies the details, usually together with existing drawings that need revising, and we look at what is actually there before anyone starts. This is followed by the handover of the drawing conventions: standards, layer structure, title blocks and the way sheets are numbered. We do not deliver everything in one go at the end, but in stages. A first set goes back, the project lead reviews it, we gather the feedback, process it and carry on with the next section. That way, by the end of the first week it is already clear whether we have read the standards correctly, rather than this only emerging at final delivery. The meeting rhythm varies by client. With tight schedules, we speak every two days; on calmer projects, weekly.
Day-to-day contact is by email, phone and meetings, and we visit the client or the client comes to us. For standalone drafting work, files go back and forth by email. On larger projects, we work with software the client can log into to follow the project's progress, which considerably reduces the number of separate status questions. Barry, our project manager, is usually the first point of contact for a new enquiry, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side. The client therefore has a fixed point of contact and does not have to work out, drawing by drawing, who a question belongs to. We work in our own environment, not the client's.
Three review layers before a sheet leaves our office
Every drawing passes through at least three review layers. A drafter produces the work, a second team member checks it, Sam then goes over it as team leader and Barry, as project manager, assesses it last before it goes to the client. That order is not a formality, because at high volume errors creep in that the drafter can no longer see. A layer set incorrectly, a dimension that did not update after a change, a sheet still carrying an old revision stamp: these are the kinds of things that only become a nuisance when they turn up in production.
Thanks to the layered review, errors are kept to a minimum in practice.
Sam plays a central role in this. He has more than fifteen years of background in architecture, worked in Iran for seven years, ran his own design firm in the Netherlands and still works as an engineer. He leads the CAD team and is responsible for the technical side and project supervision. The core of the team has around twenty-five years of experience combined, and everyone who works for us has more than ten years of CAD experience. The value of that review is clearest with messy source material.
For Firefly, we received as-built material in which the existing drawings had been printed incorrectly and were partly drawn by hand. It was poorly legible and inconsistent. We worked it out ourselves rather than calling the client about it every time, and still delivered a clean set. Our work for Firefly now covers more than twenty projects and hundreds of drawings.
Frequently asked questions about hiring a timber frame CAD drafter
Let our timber frame CAD drafters handle it
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.