I have 9 years experience drafting in AutoCAD, and am more than proficient. It takes all of 2 minutes to do a “pack and go” of a background while it takes 4 minutes to plot it on a HP1050C. After having done many design build, design assist and many as-builts, I have a high degree of certainty that cost wise, $250 a page charged to the contractor is a rip off, especially when they write it in their own specs you will require them for closeout and especially since they have already been paid to produce them for the owner.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain… I respectfully disagree about any proprietary routines and blocks being kept a secrete, that is R14 mentality and it just does not apply to as-builts, especially since a save as block, or DWF file also only takes about 2 minutes to run, and all clean up was done pre DD 90% issue.
Don’t mean to come across as snarky, I have just been there on done it on the design/engineer side and once you look behind the curtain it aint all that magical anymore, and any designer/CADD operator that cant whip out backgrounds for as-builts needs a CADD refresher course and should brush up on how to tell more believable stories.
Just my 2 cents, not trying to flame anyone, but I have a lot of bad energy from being ripped off in the past for this very issue, and in one particular case these backgrounds cost me $7,000, when all they did was copy the directory to a CD…proprietary routines and all.
[This message has been edited by ITO (edited 12-04-2006).]
