Poll: Drawing size

Just curious what the 'standard' is where you are.

I assume 11 x 17 (or A3 for ISO people) is standard, but I could be wrong.

My shop was using 24 x 36 drawings and printing them on a roll. This is extremely cumbersome for electrical drawings - especially when there are 20+ sheets to a set. I get it - the drawings are 'designed' on a 24 x 36 sheet of paper, but we shouldn't have to print them that large!

I have advocated for printing them to 11 x 17 sheets for the panel shop and assembly drawings and requiring text to be no smaller than 0.125" on a D size sheet. This saves an incredible amount of time in the printing process and are much easier to handle.

Appreciate the input.

I do electrical drawings and mostly for small panels. The schematics are often just fine on letter paper for our little telemetry panels, but often I use 11" x 17" especially if it is a larger panel just to keep the page count from growing too much. Anything larger than 11" x 17" is cumbersome in real life when those prints are needed for troubleshooting by a technician.

My minimum text size is 0.060". I am old and eyesight not good, but with my readers I can read that size text fine. 0.050 is barely legible to me. I use larger text for dimensions on panel layout drawings and for notes, but the 0.06 is readable and compact for wire numbers, device names, etc.

We don't have a plotter or printer that handles larger paper or I might do larger drawings of things like panel layouts. As it is now, I just scale them 1:4, plot them on tabloid (11 x 17) paper and put a lot of dimensions on them for the guys that fab them to read.

Most of our drawings end up being ARCH-D (24" x 36") which usually translates well to 11" x 17" when you don't want to deal with full-size drawings.

Panel layouts 24 x36 ( I mostly deal with large panels, typically 4 I/O racks).

Everything else 11x17.

We are almost exclusively 11x17 for everything. One thing that helps is that when we create pdf files of schematics the from/to arrows are actually links that jump to the corresponding location on in the drawing.

We use solid works electrical for our schematics.

ndzied1 said:

We are almost exclusively 11x17 for everything. One thing that helps is that when we create pdf files of schematics the from/to arrows are actually links that jump to the corresponding location on in the drawing.

We use solid works electrical for our schematics.

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Yep, I love that feature. Elwin does it as well.

All of our panel drawings are A4. Similar to US letter size. Convenient for bringing along in a small back pack or standard size laptop bag.

11x17 but I make the text large enough that I can print it as 8-1/2x11 and its still readable; works good for field work.

We started out using 24 x 36 drawings on blueprint paper, we then got an 11x17 printer and printed the drawing to it. only minor adjustments to the text size template (approx 1 hr). we were good to go from that point on. draw the print for a 24 x 36 then print to an 11x17. the customer could request either.
regards,
james

Toine said:

All of our panel drawings are A4. Similar to US letter size. Convenient for bringing along in a small back pack or standard size laptop bag.

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That seems to be the standard European approach: smaller pages with less stuff packed into each one. I like it but everyone around seems to prefer A3/Tabloid/B/11X17 inch size

As a system integrator doing mainly control & power panel design, we would use AutoCAD & setup the drawings scaled to 24” x 36” then usually printed them out as 11” x 17” for our use.

If another contractor or engineering was needed our drawings they could plot them as 24” x 36” if that was what they were comfortable with using.

11x17 was always fine, but as I get older its all 24x36!

You are doing something wrong if other than the layout drawings need printing in size different from A4.

ANSI D (22 x 34) for panel layouts or plan drawings for conduit runs, but ANSI B (11 x 17) for schematics.

11 x 17 for everything from mechanical, electrical, system, and panel layout for a manufacturing plant