Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
(OP)
From experience (I actually had my first dismal one today), how do you handle poorly dimensioned drawings -- drawings that do not have the dimensions necessary to manufacture, design tooling, or redraw without fair struggle? The customer did not have any other drawings to share. I went ahead and discussed it with a few of the related parties that I work with about what is required for the part. Angles, flange lengths and center points locations were missing, just to name a few. Thankfully a more skilled and experienced coworker was able to draw a close mock-up for it (I plan to interrogate his thought process and drawing thoroughly). It was a strap handle that is to be welded on to a frame so we had some freedoms with the particulars.





RE: Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
RE: Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
Knowing that typically people will not go out of their way to place things in oddball locations, I might round things to the nearest 1/32" or center things that look like they should be centered, etc. So long as it suits the assumed/known function of the part at hand. Many times assumptions can safely be made if you know what the thing IS.
When you cannot come to an agreement with the customer, there's been two successful approaches IME. One is, time allowing, sending them a sample piece as a 'first article' to approve along with a drawing we create, and all subsequent parts will be made to that 'shop drawing' and supplied sample part. Another is supplying our 'best effort' on the minimum # of parts the customer needs to 'get by' for now, and then making any revisions to our 'shop drawing' based upon feedback from our initial parts. This is based on the assumption that the customer will be paying for all of those 'best effort' tryout pieces, or understanding that it may come with some modifications as necessary in-use.
A lot is based on the relationship and communication with the guy holding the check book.
RE: Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
B.E.
You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.
RE: Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
When other approaches fail, I've had good luck converting vector drawings provided in PDF format to DXF using Inkscape, and then importing to CAD software. This has usually resulted in errors of less than a micron for the features I've been able to check.
You can do this quite easily in SOLIDWORKS, and I would bet the same is true of many other parametric modeling programs.
pylfrm
RE: Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
RE: Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.
RE: Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
RE: Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
And yes, it is as trivial to edit a dimension on a drawing and make it non-associative to the geometry as it is with a pencil or 2D program. Some drafting templates make these edited dimensions stick out from the rest.
RE: Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
Ted
RE: Inadequately Dimensioned Drawings from Customers.
Keith Cress
kcress - http://www.flaminsystems.com