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Book: arch CAD drafting standards and conventions


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No, I don't. I've been told that centimeters are used in the Benelux countries and even in some other, not so courageous, countries. If my information is incorrect, I (i) apologise and (ii) rejoice.

Freude sch?ner G?tterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium.

Wir betreten Feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!

Edited by Petri
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Christiaan,

your clients, oderers, partners or consultant are requesting a standard? which one?

we are working with any standard requested by our clients ISO, DIN, ELOT or Designhandbook.

the last ten years we did workshopdrawings for projects in europe (6.5 billion budget) - we did the designhandbook and QC the rest with our partners.

i can tell you that you can buy the complet set of ISO 128 and on monday morning you are looking for hard insoulation and ISO 128 says nothing about it.

in ISO 128 you will find the smallest common denominator which is sometimes far away from drafting and design reality.

kalinixta from greece

peter

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your clients, oderers, partners or consultant are requesting a standard? which one?

No, no requests.

i can tell you that you can buy the complet set of ISO 128 and on monday morning you are looking for hard insoulation and ISO 128 says nothing about it.

Ah, now that's interesting. Thanks for letting me know this.

I guess I could also go to the British National library and have a look at it there.

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My 2 cents worth, or is it pence. Anyway as I am not an Architect only one of a very few, relatively speaking, electrical services engineers who use VW, I for one would love a UK/EU standard library of architectural details I could pull up and then use to show my services. Do you know how much trouble I had trying to find a draw pit detail to use for my builders work drawing.

Yes I wasted a few hours creating my own, but a library would have been great.

Just to add to this point, if Computers Unlimited are meant to localise VW then why don't they use the British Standards symbol library and create symbols for us to use at least as a base point.

If I've gone off topic, sorry.

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I would have to agree. I think they could do soooo much more to add value to the UK distributed VW and with little extra effort. I'm sure there are users out that would happily contribute symbols libraries etc. For my service you could easily get more than just the Hager fuse boards from UK manufacturers if you asked and much more

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No, I don't. I've been told that centimeters are used in the Benelux countries and even in some other, not so courageous, countries. If my information is incorrect, I (i) apologise and (ii) rejoice.

Freude sch?ner G?tterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium.

Wir betreten Feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!

We do put our dimensions in cm. All things in building construction is set in cm, because 1cm is the smallest size one can get when building a house with bricks.

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It also depends on the size of the brick.

It does, indeed. Much more than it depends on the dimensioning unit.

Anyway, the bizarre and non-standard convention is probably a historic thing. In countries that moved to the metric system early (like Finland in 1887), centimeters became the default unit. I'm not quite sure when we standardised to millimetres, but I have the feeling that it would have been in the 1960s, because when I went to Uni 1971, the issue was underlined & emphasised in text books.

As a part of the standardisation of the entire building industry, we also at the same time started to use decimeters as the primary unit of overall dimensions. In the industry, a decimeter was called "the module" (M) in multiplies of 1, 3, 6, 9, 12 and so on. The standardisation body even printed and sold grid pads with a 6 mm grid, so The Architect was able to draw to scale within the Sacred System even in his or her favourite drinking hole.

In contrast, countries that stubbornly used ancient units until recently, are more orthodox. Why, in Australia (one of the recalcitrant nations) kilowatts are used even when describing car engines' power. Oddly enough, litres (cubic decimeters) and cubic centimeters are used for engine sizes, so that much about orthodoxy.

Finally, about my favourite country, the U. S. of A. Contrary to common belief, USA is neither Imperial nor Metric. Metric system is perfectly "legal" and I seem to recall that it was even explicitly made legal in the late 1800s.

And what do you know! The ever-so-reliable Wikipedia confirms my recollection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States

In 1875, the United States solidified their commitment to the development of the internationally recognized metric system by becoming one of the original seventeen signatory nations to the Convention du M?tre. The signing of this international agreement concluded five years of meetings in which the metric system was reformulated, refining the accuracy of its standards. The Treaty of the Meter, also known as the "Meter Convention", established the Bureau international des poids et mesures (BIPM, International Bureau of Weights and Measures) in S?vres, France, to provide standards of measurement for worldwide use.

In 1893, under the Mendenhall Order, metric standards, developed through international cooperation under the auspices of BIPM, were adopted as the fundamental standards for length and mass in the United States. The customary measurements ? the foot, pound, quart, etc. ? have been defined in relation to the meter and the kilogram ever since.

So, there! USA relies on the metric system! They just use their own "centimeters" etc.

But again I digress...

Edited by Petri
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Speaking of bizarre...

A certain Mr. Richard Diehl wrote (according to the legend, with his brand new Macintosh, on his kitchen table, as a CV project) an idiosyncratic, but visionary, CAD-program he called MiniCAD. In all likelihood, he followed the lead of Steve "Elliot Carter" Jobs in a quest to create Insanely Great computer systems.

The fundamental unit of measurement Mr. Diehl applied was the "mil" - a thousandth of an inch.

What a beautiful and confusing mix of systems!

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Sounds a bit bizarre to me. Why do you *need* to use cm to notate 1000mm?

a door of 100cm reads '100' on the dimension with us. Yours will be '1000'. If you can get smaller then 1cm, You'll get the smallest dimension of '1' or '10'. Now if we put our dimensions in mm, then we always have a '0' at the end of the dimension, because of that smallest size of 1cm. So it is silly to have that '0'. That's why we use cm for defining our dimensions.

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Now if we put our dimensions in mm, then we always have a '0' at the end of the dimension, because of that smallest size of 1cm.

According to Alvar Aalto, an architect's "module" is one millimetre. In Finland, any builder, carpenter or mason, can work to at least 5 millimetres. Pity that the Belges, despite their courage, are sloppy builders.

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