An Introduction to the Different Types of Construction Drawing

A multitude of components make up a construction plan and help you in understanding the types of construction drawings. Construction professionals must be aware of the various construction drawings. But it needs the skill to read them.

Construction drawings are basically instructions designed to translate the owner’s ideas, convey the type of materials, pieces, and parts needed for the project and explain the part for their placement.  If you are working in the construction industry and can decipher the drawings, you are an extremely valuable person to the team.

Types of Construction Drawing

  •         Shop Drawings

Shop drawings refer to drawings created by the contractor or subcontractor or prefab vendors to explain the design of a certain building component. These are designed mostly for MEP components of the building. These can be created to showcase cabinetry details with other elements. These are essential for planning prefabricated components of a building. Shop drawings are made before the construction begins and are accepted by the owners, design team, contractors and subcontractors.

  •         As-built Drawings

The types of construction drawings that explain the building and the accompanying components are as-built drawings. These set of drawings display the exact final construction and this includes the materials, locations, components, and dimensions with other details of the elements of the building. The contractor and the subcontractor submit this after the project is complete. These drawings help the owners maintain, update, repair, renovate and keep it safe. They are designed from the redlined variant of the original construction drawings and consume time. Drawing management procedures make it easy to update the construction.

  •         Assembly Drawings

One of the types of construction drawing is Assembly drawings. It speaks for items comprised of more than one component. They showcase how the components fit together and thus may comprise of elevations and sections, orthogonal plans, or 3D views, display assembled components or an exploded view representing the relationship between the components and the manner in which they fit together.

  •         A Block Plan

A block plan displays the siting of buildings as blocks lay on the maps of the surrounding area. A variety of markups can be utilized for showing the roads, boundaries and other related details. Though it depends on the size of the project, a standard scale of block plans are 1:2500, 1:1250 and 1:500. ‘Block plan’ is sometimes called as a ‘site plan’. They are same and display the development site including the position of the proposed building/buildings along with access to vegetation, roads, utilities and more. The access and the development site are in red outline and the land owned by the developer in blue outline.

  •         Component Drawing

Usually, the components are ‘self-contained’ and taken from a single supplier. The complete unit is provided by the supplier instead of the constituent parts. Component drawings are the types of construction drawings with all the information of the individual units. They can be drawn at large scales such as 1:10, 1:5, 1:2, and 1:1 and so forth. This can also have information such as construction, dimensions, tolerance and so forth. A component is a part of a building built as an independent unit, subassembly or subsystem. It can be blended or joined with other elements to make a complicated item. A combination of components can be explained as an assembly.

  •         Construction Drawings/Working Drawing

It is a common term used for drawings part of the production information put into tender documentation followed by the contract documents for the construction purpose. This means it has legal importance and is a part of the contract between the contractor and the employer. As one of the types of construction drawing, it provides a graphic representation of what is built. All construction drawings must be concise and coordinate well to prevent confusion and uncertainty. Misunderstanding can be reduced by coordinating the drawings. A construction drawing is drawn to scale, either in a plan, elevation or a section view. They follow typical architectural hatchings and symbols to interpret and decipher.

Working Drawings give dimensioned and graphical information to be sued by the supplier to forge components of the works to install or gather the components. These comprise of structural drawings, architectural drawings, civil drawings, electrical drawings, mechanical drawings and so forth.

  •         Design drawings

Design drawings are created to develop and communicate the ideas regarding an ongoing design. Design drawings are made by different people such as technicians, architects and technologists, civil engineers, structural engineers, landscape designers, interior designers, subcontractors, contractors, suppliers and so on. The purpose must be considered, the information it intends to convey and to whom it is intended for. This decides the content, format, scale, size and so forth. They should be coordinated and integrated well to ensure all elements are designed as per the detail.

  •         Detail Drawings

One of the most comprehensive types of construction drawings is detail drawings. It tells us about a detailed description of the geometric form of a part of an item. This includes bridge, building, tunnel, plant, machine and so on. They are large-scale drawings showing parts in detail parts that may be included in general arrangement drawings.

Summing up

Drawing management procedure of an online tool helps in making the task easier and simpler for the professionals in the construction industry. Use cad drawing management software to create various types of construction drawings and save time.

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