Master the craft of dimensioning restroom elevations in AutoCAD, with a particular focus on adding ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant dimensions. This article provides a detailed walkthrough of the process, including how to adjust your dimensions to display in inches, and how to add qualifying details like maximum or range values to your dimensions.
Key Insights
- The article provides a comprehensive guide on how to dimension restroom elevations in AutoCAD, specifically ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant dimensions. These are slightly different as they require more detail and must be displayed in inches.
- To create ADA compliant dimensions, one must adjust the dimension style including the unit format to fractional and adding an inch mark as a suffix. The adjusted dimension style is then used to dimension specifics such as the height of the sink or grab bars.
- ADA dimensions often include qualifiers like maximum or minimum values, or a range. For example, a sink may have a maximum height of 34 inches, while a grab bar may have a range of 33 to 36 inches. These specific details are important for ADA compliance.
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Now let's take a look at our restroom elevations. Let's double click off to the side to be back in paper space, and then move our view up to look at these restroom elevations. Now let's go ahead and double click in that restroom elevation view.
It's active, and we want to add some dimensions. And you might ask yourself, we've already done lots of dimensioning, why should we do more? These are a little bit different. We're going to dimension ADA dimensions.
So how do we do that? Let's zoom in first to our restroom elevation one, center it there for you, and we'll type in layer. And we want to change our layer up to the top, a.ano.dims. Double click, make that active, our current layer, and now we'll type in dim linear. And we want to dimension the top of the sink.
We want to show the ADA dimension. We'll click one time right here at the very top of that vanity, and then we'll go straight down to the floor. Now we want to go to the very bottom line.
Don't confuse this blue line with the floor. This line labeled B2, that's our base. Remember from the finish plan, that's our wall base.
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We have a tile wall base we're showing there. We want to go straight down all the way perpendicular to the floor. Click, and then pull our cursor away, and click again.
Now that is kind of a regular dimension, two foot ten inches. Now we want to be a little bit different for ADA. Number one, we want to show inches, and we want to give a little bit more detail.
Let's go ahead and delete that, and we'll try again. Select it, delete it, and let's go to dim style, and we want to create our own. Right now we have one called AEC dimension small.
Let's go ahead and do a new one. We're going to click on the new button after AEC dimension small is selected. Click on new, and it's called copy of AEC small.
Let's delete the copy of, and instead of inches or small, let's do small dash inches. We're starting with AEC small, that makes sense, and go ahead and click continue. We need to swap this out for inches.
If we look over at primary unit, right now the unit format is set to architectural. Click that drop down, and change it to fractional. Now it will display inches, but there's a problem.
There is no longer an inch mark, so we also have to add in a suffix. Our suffix here is our inches mark. If we click away, look at the preview here, we'll see the inches mark comes back into play.
That's all we need. Go ahead and click okay, and we want to make sure our current dimension style is set to the small inches style that we just made, and click close. Now we'll try again.
Dim linear, and from the top of the vanity, we'll click and go straight down to the floor. Click, pull away, and beautiful. Now we have just inches, which is more appropriate for an ADA dimension.
Now we want to add some additional details. We'll double click, and after the 34, ADA dimensions usually give us kind of a, that's the maximum dimension, or a minimum dimension. They're always kind of qualified somehow.
In this case, it's a max. The sink can be no higher, then 34 inches max. We'll type in max, period, for maximum, and maybe give that a space.
Then click off to the side, and now we have it. 34 inches maximum to the top of the sink. Pretty cool, right? That's our first ADA dimension.
Let's go to number two, restroom elevation, and this one's doing okay. We'll go ahead and skip over here to number three. Number three, we've got some grab bars.
So let's go ahead and dimension the height of this grab bar. Let's do dim linear, and we'll zoom in and grab right here at the center point of that grab bar. Click there, and go straight down again to the ground, perpendicular, pull it away, and we have 34 inches, and click.
Now that is our desired height, but the ADA usually gives us ranges, minimums, maximums. In this case, we have a range. We'll double click, and we'll just click off to the side.
You'll see the highlighted part is calculated by AutoCAD. We can add anything we want. I'll add a space, and then I'll do a parentheses, and I'll do 33-36.
So that's the range that that grab bar could be in and still be compliant with ADA. Click away, and there it is. Looks pretty good, right? We wanted it at 34, but if the contractor puts it anywhere between 33 and 36, we're going to be okay with the ADA.
Now we have this vertical grab bar right here. Let's do dim linear again, and we'll grab a center point there of that grab bar, and go straight to the right, grab the perpendicular face of the wall, and then we'll go up a little bit. So that's 40 inches.
Click to place it. Now we'll double click, and again we have a range. So it's going to calculate at 40 inches.
Let's do space, parentheses, and this could be anywhere from 39 to 41, and end parentheses, and click away, and there it is. ADA dimensions. We are super professional now.
