Discover the intricacies of architectural and engineering scales in constructions, and how they are applied in measuring drawings and printing them to the right size. This article dives deep into the importance of scales in creating a site plan, measuring property lines and understanding regulations related to property development.
Key Insights
- The article explains the use of architectural and engineering scales in construction. Architectural scales are used in houses, where a quarter inch, half inch or an inch is equivalent to a foot. Engineering scales are usually divided into tenths of an inch, with an inch representing 100 feet.
- The content emphasizes the role of scales in interpreting site plans. It demonstrates how a scale of an inch to 100 feet can be used to measure distances on a property, such as the length of property lines, and convert them into corresponding lengths on a drawing or plan.
- The article also discusses how to interpret property lines and details in a CAD drawing, including METES and BOUNDS or limits information, which provides the direction and length of each segment of the property line. It mentions the use of a property line type in CAD, typically represented with a long line and two shorter lines, and the importance of printing the plan at full size for accurate measurements.
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Now what I would like to show you is the plan of the site. So, here we have the plan of the site for the house. Here is the house, right here in the middle of the property.
You can see that it says plan of the site. Here on the right, it says one inch is equal to 100 feet, so, as I showed you in the scale drawing, all this was drawn to real size. But it was reduced so that it fit on our cover sheet to a scale of one inch is equivalent to 100 feet.
Now, normally we have two different types of scales that we will use when we are measuring drawings. We have architectural scales and engineering scales, and there are also metric scales. But in North America, not much metric construction is done.
An architectural scale is most commonly used in the house itself. A quarter inch is equivalent to a foot, a half inch is equivalent to a foot or an inch is equivalent to a foot. Engineering scales are usually divided into tenths of an inch.
So, on an engineering scale, an inch represents 100 feet. And what that would mean is that if you had the right scale in your hands, and if you had the drawing printed on paper, that if you were to measure. For example, this segment here, this is saying that from this point right here, to this point here, are 290 feet.
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Now again, the full size of this set of drawings is 22 × 32 inches. The images you are printing are half the size, which would be 11 × 17. So you would have to print this area to full size for this scale to work.
But if you were to print this area to full size. And if you had to keep your scale, which was a scale of an inch is equivalent to 100 feet. When you measure from this corner to this corner, it would actually give me 2.9 inches.
Because 2.9 inches reflect 290 feet. Now, you can see this line that goes around the perimeter of the project. This is called the property line.
The type of line is called the property line type. In CAD, we will often use a type of ghost line to represent the property line. The property line is generally represented with a long line, two shorter lines and the pattern is repeated.
Now you can see that again, this is saying from this corner to this corner there are 290 feet. But above are what we call METES and BOUNCE or information of limits. This is saying that measured from this corner right here, that this segment of the property.
It is 88.4 meters long, but its angle is north 89 degrees 51 minutes 36 seconds west. As we have four directions, I'm going to go down here to the north arrow. We have north, we have south, we have east and we have west.
So, when we do information of limits, we typically present the information using the north. And that means that the direction of a property line relative to the north and south. But then, as it turns to the east or west.
So I can see that this segment here is 290 feet long, goes to the north 89 degrees 51 minutes 30 seconds west. This segment here goes to the north and is 350 feet long. This longest segment here goes to the south 590 feet, but goes to the south 33 degrees.
So many minutes and seconds to the east. So, again, you have the property lines that are normally transmitted using the measures and the limits of the information. If I look at this segment here to the left, it says 350 feet, so it says north 350 feet, you can see the property line.
But you can also see these little arches that are here. And those arches tell us the length of the segment that is presented as north at 350 feet. We have the property lines, we have the information limits, within that, you will see a discontinuous line.
That discontinuous line represents the retrocess of the property. Typically we have regulations that tell us how close we can build to the edge of a property. And so we have reversals that say that you cannot build within this area.
We have the property line, within that, we have our retrocess line. I have a description of the property so that you can see that I have the number of plot of the landowner. And then it is showing that this property has 10 acres.
