Caught a major drawing error from 3 years of using decimal feet wrong

I finally figured out last week that I had been entering coordinates in decimal feet instead of architectural feet for almost 3 years. It was a buddy from a firm in Nashville who spotted it when I sent him a DXF file. Everything looked fine on screen but the dimensions were off by fractions that added up to inches on longer runs. I switched to always double checking the units settings before I even open a template now. Anyone else had a software setting mess up their drafts and not catch it until way later?

2 comments

2 Comments

thompson.tyler5d ago

Yeah I feel that. I had a similar thing happen with hatch scale settings in an old version of AutoCAD. I was just blindly accepting the default and everything looked fine until I printed a set of plans and the hatch patterns were completely wrong for the scale. Took me two days to figure out why my section cuts looked like garbage. Now I have a checklist I run through before I start any new project. Its annoying but beats redoing a whole set of drawings.

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hayden_rodriguez5d ago

TWO DAYS? @thompson.tyler I would have lost my mind. I'm bad about just clicking through defaults too until something blows up in my face. One time I accidentally had my dimension text set to a paper space height instead of model space and didn't catch it until I had labeled half a site plan. Redoing all those callouts was brutal.