Discover the importance of creating A201 sheet files regularly throughout the progress of your work to communicate clearly with clients or bosses. Learn the essential steps to set up your sheet files accurately and professionally, ensuring clean and precise drawings.
Key Insights
- Building and sharing sheet files, such as A201, regularly throughout the progress of work allows for transparent communication with clients or bosses, even if the work is not yet complete.
- Utilizing a no plot in your work helps organize your sheet by setting space for dimensions, aligning wall and other geometry from sheet to sheet, and ensuring a clean, clear, and precise presentation of your drawings.
- The no plot plays a crucial role in this workflow, with the process involving changing your layer to layer 0, setting up your scale factor and insertion point, and placing the block in the exact center of your drawing, among other steps.
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In this video we are going to start building our A201 sheet file. It's important to remember that we like to build our sheet files early and often so that it can show others, including our boss or maybe our client, our progress up to a certain point.
It's much easier to share a PDF file of our work even if it's not complete. The client might just want the floor plan outlined so that they can sketch on it. Also, we want to bring in our no plot.
This will help us organize our sheet by setting a space for our dimensions, but also it will allow us to line up our wall geometry and other geometry from sheet to sheet. Remember, we want this bit of geometry to line up on every single sheet we print. That way, when someone's reviewing our drawings, it's easy to understand and it makes us look clean and clear.
We don't want our drawings to be sloppy or misaligned because that might reflect poorly on you or it might reflect poorly on the firm. Clean and clear and precise drawings show a good understanding of CAD drafting and attention to detail. So let's bring in our no plot.
First thing I want to do is change my layer to layer 0. Remember, layer 0 is our assembly layer and that's where we like to bring in our geometry. Remember that we're going to bring this no plot in at a scaled up scale factor so that the no plot can align us with our viewport in paper space. That way, our model is scale factor of 1, our paper space is a scale factor of 1, but the viewport using the no plot scales our model space down.
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We can print our sheet at a scale factor of 1 and everything works a little bit more streamlined. But the no plot is the key to this workflow. So let's go I enter to open up our blocks panel.
I'll move my screen over to the side and we can see that there are currently no drawing blocks in this file. Now I will turn on my insertion point option and I'll change my uniform scale to a scale factor of 48. Our rotation is zero, we are not repeating and we are not exploding.
So everything here is set up appropriately. Now before we browse and bring in our no plot, I want to talk about where this is being placed. Remember, we want to place this in the exact center of our drawing and there's currently no geometry there.
In our previous course, we drew a diagonal line from the bottom left to the top right and that allowed us to find a midpoint where we could place our no plot. Well remember, the mid between two points option is an object snap and that is essentially doing the same thing. So let's use the mid between two points when placing this block.
So I have insertion point checked and my scale factor of 48. I'll browse for this block and you'll see that I am ending up in my title blocks folder already. If you aren't, that's okay.
Browse and here's CAD201 file downloads, blocks, title blocks, and here we're going to use no plot ANSI A. This is eight and a half by eleven. I'll hit open and now we want to place it at the mid between two points from this endpoint here to this endpoint here. So I'll shift right click mid between two points, endpoint here, and endpoint here.
Zoom extents, control s to save. I'll close my blocks panel for now. One thing I want to say is if you didn't insert this at the exact right location, that's okay.
You don't need to restart this workflow from scratch. I'll move this away just for the example and you can see that now I've placed it in the wrong location. In order to move this back into the right location, I simply need to use the same workflow, but now it's broken into two parts.
So what I need to do is activate this with a move and I can do that with a grip edit by clicking the grip to make it hot and now simply go to shift right click mid between two points one more time from the bottom left here to the top right here. Zoom extents, control s to save. I know that we show a lot of processes as a single one step flow and that's to keep the video short, but you can always do these in multiple steps.
Multiple trim commands back to back or placing a block, rotating a block, moving a block. It can be done in multiple steps. Just know that we try to keep it clean and clear for the videos, but if you mess up halfway through, that's okay.
You don't need to restart the process from scratch. I will see you in the next video when we create our VDCI8201 sheet file.
