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The old draftsman who told me to 'never trust a dimension until you check it yourself'
I had an old senior draftsman named Bob who drilled this into me on my first job back in 2017. He said never assume a dimension on a structural drawing is right just because it's printed. I thought he was just being paranoid. Then last year I had a set of steel shop drawings where a bolt hole pattern was off by 3/8 of an inch. I checked the original architectural plan and sure enough, the dimension was wrong. Bob saved me from a whole job site redo. Has anyone else caught a bad dimension from a supposedly final set?
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linda5001mo ago
Oh man, Bob was absolutely right! I had a similar thing happen on a commercial project back in 2018. The drawings showed a column base plate dimension that looked fine on paper, but when I double-checked it against the actual foundation layout, it was off by half an inch. The structural engineer had changed the column size late in the game but forgot to update the base plate layout. I caught it because I was checking everything after a bad experience with a window placement a few months earlier. Your mileage may vary on trusting printed numbers, but I learned the hard way that a dimension is just a suggestion until you verify it yourself.
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