How fabricators can ensure quality balustrade design for their customers

CAD managers and engineers use standards for a uniform drawing, drafting, and modeling approach. Whether you use ANSI, TEMA, BS, or any other drawing standards, your CAD system must understand it. Some aspects a CAD manager should take care of:

• Drawing templates: Set up initial standardized configurations for CAD drafting and drawing templates across the project to accelerate balustrade design drafting.
• Best practices documents: Follow the guidelines as per the documents prepared and approved by senior CAD engineers of the organization to maintain uniformity.
• CAD libraries: Save CAD models and drawings in libraries that are repetitively used across the projects to cut modeling and drafting time.

Taking care of these aspects at the start of the project ensures seamless design development. Using manufacturing drawings created as per Australian standards saved a sheet metal manufacturer 18% on costs. For this football stadium project, design engineers at Hitech CADD Services converted Revit® data for handrails and guardrails into SolidWorks drawings.

Drafters spend significant time understanding design intent, shop floor processes, balustrade material qualities, etc. while developing CAD drawings for building products. These drawings are then annotated with manufacturing process precautionary symbols, remarks, and notes which make the drawings difficult to read.

You must have experienced this if you have worked simultaneously on two different but similar kinds of projects – for instance, designing a balustrade for a hotel and a high-end luxury villa. These drawing files could be misleading and get interchanged resulting in design data disruption. One way to avoid this problem is establishing CAD standards.

Below is a list of a few commonly used items in any CAD project:

• File naming convention: Establishing a standard practice helps retrieve and relocate old files especially when there are too many different balustrade project drawings.
• File structure: This item is particularly important during the design approval stages. You need to categorize all the project files into existing, proposed, research, and record drawings. Grouping helps in projects that have a long time lapse between the design finalization and installation.
• Layering: Uniformity in layering, while developing drawings, is necessary for clear cross-functional communication across the organization. For example, a file with a different layer for color, visibility, and shape, etc. with description becomes self-explanatory while reviewing. It also eases the changes in dimensioning as civil work progresses.
• Annotation: Style and color are extremely important for balustrades as they drive building aesthetics. However, there are multiple instructions for every balustrade design which makes it impossible to detail everything. Instead, creating codes for specific texts such as orientation, dimension style, leader callouts, etc. helps.
• Plotting: Any balustrade manufacturing drawings when shared with shop floor engineers will essentially be a print of 2D lines. To accurately represent each line and communicate the intent, a standardized plot set with varying line weights and defined colors is reliable.

A single balustrade design doesn’t fit every need. This triggers compromised quality and delays during the design stage. Deployment of visual configurator empowers fabricators to accurately understand customer needs.

By adopting a configurator developed in DriveWorks or Tacton, the customer can build balustrades from scratch and specify little details like:

• Primary material and color
• Type of finish, shape, dimension
• Rounded or unrounded corners
• Cut strings
• Grooved or ungrooved handrails
• Fixtures for decking on balcony or stairways

Another benefit is ensuring reliable balustrade installation. With changing primary material and finish, the installation and assembly precautions also vary. A visual configurator allows you to generate manufacturing drawings with customized installation guidelines. This helps both, the fabricator and the customer.

Benefits of balustrade configurator to the fabricator:

Once customers confirm the orders, the fabricator receives auto-generated engineering drawings with 99.99% quality. The shop floor is also prompted with BOMs, part lists and cut lists for fabrication.

Benefits of balustrade configurator to the customers:

Upon confirmation, the customers will also receive an email with 3D model and 100% accurate sales quote for their configured product. For example, a stainless steel and glass balustrade will be costlier than a cast-iron or aluminum balustrade. These calculations are taken care of by the configurator.