Got called out by an engineer for my plot scaling at a review last month

I was at a city review meeting for a commercial site plan in Portland, and the city engineer stopped the whole thing to point out my scale bar was off by 1/8 of an inch. I used to just copy and paste scale bars from old drawings without double checking, you know, thinking it looked close enough. Turns out that tiny mistake threw off a whole setback calculation by like 2 feet on the ground. I had to resubmit everything and push the permit back by 3 weeks while I fixed it. Now I have a dedicated scale bar layer in every file with a note to verify the paper size before I even plot. Has anyone else had a dumb plotting mistake turn into a huge delay like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_john1mo ago

Funny how the scale bar error wasn't the real problem - it was everyone trusting the drawing without verifying.

sandragonzalez1mo agoTop Commenter

Wait, isn't that kind of the whole point of a technical drawing though? People trust the scale bar because it's supposed to be the one constant, the thing you can rely on to measure everything else. It's like trusting the ruler in a ruler; once it's wrong, everything built from it is wrong too.