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A senior drafter told me my CAD layers were a mess and it stuck with me for days
I was showing my plans to a guy who has been drafting since the 80s, and he just looked at my layer naming system and said "son, you are making work for yourself." He showed me his setup using just 7 layers with a simple color code instead of the 25 I had. It really hit different because he was right - I was overcomplicating everything and slowing down my revisions. Has anyone else had an old timer simplify your whole workflow with a few hard rules?
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terryj4517d ago
The 7 layer color code trick sounds like it came from back when plotters used actual pens. @abby836 mentioned line weights and that's the real key here - your senior guy probably matched his layer colors to physical pen sizes on his old plotter. I switched to a similar system using just red for hidden lines at 0.5mm and yellow for centerlines at 0.25mm and it made my plots look cleaner than anything I ever did with 20 layers. Do you find yourself sticking with that same color logic even when you're just working on screen now?
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thompson.christopher17d ago
Man, that senior drafter basically handed you the cheat codes and you didn't even know you were playing on hard mode. 25 layers is basically asking for a headache every time you go back to edit something. The old school pen plotter logic is hilarious though - like they figured out the whole system based on what color pen was in the machine that day. Your post is just proof that guys who've been doing this since drafting boards were still a thing probably have the best shortcuts buried in their brains.
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abby83617d ago
Learned that lesson myself about 15 years ago when a senior engineer showed me his layer system. He had a rule that if you needed more than 10 layers, you were probably overthinking it. His blueprints were cleaner and took half the time to revise because everything had a place. Simple color coding for line weights and one layer for dimensions cut my errors way down too.
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