Discover the importance of a final sheet check and how to ensure your AutoCAD drawings are accurate and up-to-date. Learn how to troubleshoot common mistakes and update drawings to reflect the most recent changes.
Key Insights
- The importance of conducting a final sheet check of all your AutoCAD drawings to verify their accuracy and ensure they act as a full sheet set.
- The need to update drawings when changes have been made, such as the case demonstrated with the A-401 sheet file where a new PDF was printed to reflect changes made to the composition shingles scale.
- The importance of identifying and correcting common mistakes, such as the issue with the A-302 drawing where the outline should have been on top of the hatch, and how to correct these issues in AutoCAD.
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Before we go, I want to do one final sheet check of all our sheet files. So, in my File Explorer window, I'm going to go into the Sheets folder, here it is, and I've sorted by file type, and I'm going to open up all of my PDFs, including my 301 and 302 files.
Before we're done with the course, I want to make sure that all of these drawings look correct and accurate, and that they act as a full sheet set. Okay, let's start with S-100. This looks good.
Let's make sure the rebar is in the right place, it's not overlapping with our walls. All of our line types look appropriate. Our title block logo has come in appropriately.
Excellent. When I'm done, I'll close it. Here's the E-100 sheet.
Everything here looks great. All of our symbols are connected to the walls. All of the lights are connected to the switches.
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And our doors, walls, windows, fixtures, and counter are all turned to this gray color. Excellent. Let's do the A-201 sheet file next.
This is the floor plan we're used to seeing. Everything here looks great and up-to-date. We didn't change any of the data on this sheet.
Excellent. Now the A-401 sheet file does not match our elevation files because this is a PDF, not the DWG. We changed our composition shingles scale to match this scale, but here we did not print a new PDF.
So that's a big issue. We should print our new PDF. So I'll minimize this.
I'll go File, Open in AutoCAD, choosing our A-401 sheet file and hit open. Believe it or not, we don't have to do any extra drafting or work in AutoCAD. We just have to open the file, make sure that the XREF updates appropriately, which it has.
And if this were a real-world project, we might want to update the date we print it. Now you might be doing this on your own. So go ahead and update the date if you would like.
I'll go Control+P to plot, set my pen assignments to the color table file, preview. There we go. There's the updated hatch scale.
I'll hit Right-click, Exit. I'm back in my Plot dialog box. Everything looks good, but to print my drawing, I will have to first close this A-401 because I want to overwrite the file.
So I'll go ahead and close A-401. Then I'll hit okay and choose A-401 and hit Save. Now it'll say, do you want to overwrite the file? I'll hit Yes.
And then it'll plot again. Here we go. I'll bring it up full screen.
And there it is. Our A-401 drawing has now been updated. Excellent.
One more drawing that I want us to take a look at is the A-302 drawing and the A-301 drawing. Here's my A-301 drawing and my A-302 drawing. And you'll notice something right away about the A-302 drawing, if you're paying very close attention.
Up here at the top, you'll see that our hatch goes on top of our outline. Now this is slightly confusing, right? The outline should be on top of our hatch in every circumstance so that we're coloring within the lines. This is a fairly common mistake that we forget about.
So I'm going to come back into my AutoCAD, go to my LF model, and I'll select both of my roof hatches, right click, draw order, send to back. I'll Control+S to save my LF model, and I'll reprint both my A-301 and A-302 drawings. So I'll make sure that all of my drawings are closed in my PDF reader.
I'll close them out. Then I can go to A-301, reload my XREF right here. We'll see the comparison hasn't changed anything on this view because it does not compare hatches.
Control+P to print, set my color table file, preview. Excellent. Let's Right-click, Plot.
This was A-301, so I'll choose the A-301. Save and overwrite. Same thing on A-302.
Let's reload, hit the checkbox for compare. Control+P to plot, set my color table file, preview. Everything looks good.
Right-click, Plot and choose A-302. Save. Yes to overwrite.
And here are the final drawings. Excellent. Now those roof hatches are behind the outline.
It is an excellent practice to do this with all of the drawings and all of the sheet sets that you're working on in the real-world. Make yourself a checklist and go through each sheet before you send it off to your client, just to make sure that everything is in the right place and more importantly, up-to-date. I hope you've enjoyed this Intermediate AutoCAD course, and I hope to see you in the next course, AutoCAD Construction Documents.
See you there.
