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Community and Q&A

GBA Construction Details criticism & question

user-123790 | Posted in General Questions on

First, I thoroughly appreciate the effort to organize and share a large volume of quality construction details on GBA. Excellent information.
However, I’m disappointed that the .dwg versions of details are incredibly time consuming to work with for the following reasons:

1. Details and objects are completely exploded which makes them very inefficient to work with and revise. Leader arrows are not even singular entities and are exploded into 4 separate objects. Hatches are often dozens of exploded objects which is painful to select in order to edit.

2. All text is single line text, rather than multiline text which can be moved, resized and edited as a single entity rather than individual text lines that need to be realigned or edited separately. I know I can consolidate using TXT2MTXT command, but jeez.

3. Many (most) lineweights are not controlled By Layer, rather forced line thickness and color. That’s fine for a few lines/objects, but a nightmare if we have to tweak numerous details to make them plot correctly.

4. Almost all layers are ‘white’ color with ‘continuous’ linetype in the Layer Manager, yet the actual objects on those layers are overrided for unique color and linetype. That removes all (easy) ability to change a particular layer color or linetype with a single click.

I really studied the Detail Library to see if I could understand an underlying drafting methodology, but the techniques used to draft and construct these details do not seem to abide by any CAD Standards that I have ever encountered over multiple offices and decades. I’ve been in the game a long time, but don’t claim to be a guru on this stuff, so I hope someone can enlighten me on an efficient process to edit/tweak downloaded details without having to touch every single object fragment to do it.
Great inherent information in these details, just hard to work with the .dwg’s.

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Replies

  1. user-2310254 | | #1

    Great feedback. Hopefully the GBA staff will take note and respond.

  2. GBA Editor
    Martin Holladay | | #2

    Spencer,
    Here at GBA, we are aware that our details have problems and need improvements. Your suggestions are much appreciated; thanks for taking the time to write.

    I am copying your comments to a "improvements wish list" file. As you can imagine, editors like me have many web site improvement requests that aren't easy to implement because of budget restrictions. But I hope that needed improvements will eventually be made. Again, thanks.

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