Creating Standard Size Detail Borders in AutoCAD: Step-by-Step Guide

Let's begin the process of creating a One-by-One standard size Detail Border. So I'm going to go File, New. I can either go File, New up there, or I can wait for this to collapse.

I can go to the Start menu, and I can create a new drawing using the template and choose VDCI 01 as my drawing template file. And then I can save my file. I'm in my CAD folder, and I'm going to go down and choose my VDCI Detail Border, 1Horizontal, 1Vertical.dwg, and overwrite the file.

I'm going to go back to my 30×42 drawing. I'm going to say Edit, Copy with Base Point. I'm going to choose a base point of right here and put a window around the one cell.

Come into here and go CTRL V and pop it in at 0,0. Zoom Extents. Go into my 22×34, do the same thing. Edit, Copy with Base Point.

Here's a base point. Put a window around it. Go to the 1Horizontal, 1Vertical.

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Pop it in at 0,0. And you can see that here is the size of my Detail Border for a 30×42. Here's the same 1×1 for a 22×34. And the distance in the sizes is right around 9/16 of an inch in the X direction and 149/256 in the Y position.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to move the smaller detail so that it's at the centroid of the other detail. I'm going to go to Home tab. I'm going to draw a line from the end to the end and a line from the end to the end.

I'm going to move these from the mid of the angled line to the mid of this angled line. I can erase this and I can save the file. Zoom Extents, Zoom Real Time.

So here's what's going to happen. We're going to keep everything we draw—we're going to keep it within this interior rectangle. But when we go to pop the detail into the sheets, we'll either position them using that outer corner or this inner corner.

So there's one philosophy in when you're assembling details—how do you insert them or Xref them in? Typically, we build detail sheets from this corner down and then over to the left. So typically, you don't really have anything over here to grab onto. So people will frequently have the base point of their Detail Borders being the top right corner.

Because when I first start populating it, I'll say pop it in at the end of that corner right there. So what we're going to do is we're going to move the geometry in the One Horizontal, One Vertical. The base point will still be 0,0, but 0,0 will be this top right corner.

So I'm just going to say Move Crossing from the end of here to 0,0, Zoom Extents, Zoom Real Time, and save the file. Now, from a layer standpoint, the layers that we already have in the drawing are 0 and No Plot. What I want to do is I want to bring in the Detail or Title Block layer color into the drawing.

Go to the View tab under Palettes, click on the Design Center, or type DC at the command prompt. Go to the C drive and go to the CAD Detailing folder. And you can see all of the drawings that I have in here.

If I'd like to, I can stretch this out a little bit farther. Now again, if your Design Center does not look like mine, you can always choose the visibility modes right here. I keep mine on Details.

You can see that there are the icons. I don't care to work that way. I keep mine on Details.

So I'm going to slide down and choose my Title Block, TTLB 30×42. I will expand it. I'll go to Layers.

I'll take the Title Block layer and drag it into the drawing. And I'm going to go on and close the Design Center. So I've brought the layer into here.

So then one of the questions starts to be: how do you deal with your borders? And so what a lot of people do is—rather than having the Detail Borders in the details themselves—they end up having the border tick marks in the 30×42 or 22×34 sheet. So what would normally happen is, for example, I would draw a line. Well, first I would check my layers.

I would make sure that I'm on the Title Block layer. And again, remember, we drew all of these on the No Plot layer. If you happened to have drawn yours, for example, on the 0 layer, and you know how to do this, you can always select the geometry with a crossing and migrate it to the No Plot layer.

I'm going to hit Escape. Go to Title Block. And now I'm going to go and make Title Block my current layer.

I'll draw a line from here down an eighth of an inch. Copy Last. Copy this from the end.

Mirror Window from the mid of the vertical straight over. Draw a line from the end of here over an eighth of an inch. Copy Last.

Down. Mirror Window from the mid. And you can see that what it wants to do is it wants to grab the midpoint of my actual Detail Border.

So I'm going to make sure I have Selection Cycling turned on. So Mirror Window from the mid. And Selection Cycling should kick in.

It's apparently not. So what I'm going to do instead, I'm going to draw a line Nearest to here, Perpendicular to right there. Then I'm going to say Mirror Window from the mid of that angled line.

Straight down. Erase out the line. I'm going to erase out the Detail Border so you can now see that I have little tick marks that I can use when I start populating my details in the sheet.

I'm going to save this file. Go back to the 22×34. Draw a line from the end down.

Whoops. Change my layer. Go to Title Block.

Draw a line down an eighth of an inch. Copy Last. Mirror Window from the mid.

I'm going to choose this line over here because it's the same thing. Ortho's on. Straight over.

A line from the end of here over a quarter of an inch. Copy Last. A line Nearest to here, Perpendicular to here.

Mirror Window from the mid of here. Straight down. Erase this.

Erase this. I'm just going to confirm some dimensions. I'm going to say what's the distance from the end to the end? An eighth of an inch.

What's the distance here? An eighth of an inch. I might have said a quarter of an inch, but I actually typed in an eighth of an inch. So, again, I have my tick marks so that when I go to insert the Detail Border, I'll be popping it in to that point up there.

So I'm going to go back to my 1×1 Vertical. And so now we've begun the actual formatting for the Detail Border. I'm going to save this.

I'm going to go into my 30×42. Just for fun, I'm going to make my current layer 0. Xref.

I'm going to Attach. Attach a drawing. I'm going to go into my C drive.

Choose my Detail Border. Go Open. Specify insertion point on screen as an attachment.

Go OK. I'm just going to pop it in right here for right now. Because one thing that's happening is my Xref View Mode is not set to Auto-Hide.

So I'm going to turn that to be back to Auto-Hide. Now when I click on the screen, it will collapse. Now I can move the detail from the end of here up to the end here.

And you can see that it's right on top of that little tick mark. Go into XR. Pick on it.

Right Button. Detach. Come into here.

CTRL S to save. And Zoom Extents. Now I have my Title Block done with my tick marks.

I'm saving the file. 22×34 with the tick marks. Saving the file.

My One Horizontal, One Vertical. Save the file. And when we come back, we're going to start working on actually building out our One-by-One Horizontal Vertical.

See you in a few minutes.