Tech Drawing Best Practice

Best Practice

• Show dimensions in an organized way, and ideally corresponding to actual location from which a person would measure. This makes the tech drawing highly functional, as opposed to requiring a lot of parsing of information.
• Show minimum required information to eliminate time spent on irrelevant information
• Create user-specific tech drawings. Someone with experience will likely require less information.
• Show additive dimensions (length of 132" when 89 and 43 were already measured) only if they are obviously useful for quality control.
• Distinguish quality control measurements from functional measurements
• Use fiducials in priority over actual dimensions, unless dimensions are required (for quality control or other purposes)
• Include quality control information
• Number your callouts to help in tracking of the callouts
• Keep the way information is presented consistent between drawings if a number of similar drawings is present - so that the user learns to read drawings more efficiently
• Show hidden lines, for example to show identical pieces one behind each when ovserved from 3 planes.

Advanced

• Number the measurements in the order they should be used.
• Automate full extraction of tech drawings from FreeCAD, with toggles based on the type of information required. This could also be used to adapt tech drawings to the user.
• Require drafters to participate in building to learn the entire build process.