how do i get the scale for a land?

[Joe29]

Hello,

I am quite new with autoCAD and am catching up pretty well but the problem now is this. I need to make a building plan for a land measuring 100 x 75 ft but I do not know how to draw the scale on my work space using autocad 2012.

Please your comment will go a long way in helping me carry out this task.

[ReMark]

You do not draw "to scale" as one might do on a drafting board. You draw everything in model space at FULL size no matter how big or small the object. Scale will come into play when you move to your paper space layout.

 

BTW...what size paper were you ultimately thinking of printing this site plan to?

 

After you have created your site plan switch from Model space to Layout1. Right-click the Layout1 tab and select Page Setup Manager. At the Page Manager window select Modify. At the next screen select your printer, paper size, plot style table (I suggest Monochrome) and drawing orientation. Leave everything else alone. Click on the OK button to return to your layout. Follow me so far?

 

One question. Have you given any thought as to which units you will be using? Your options are Decimal (the default), Architectural, Engineering, Fractional and Scientific. I think we can pretty much discount the last two and I'm not so sure it would be a good idea to draw a site plan using decimal inches.

Edited November 8, 2013 by ReMark

[ReMark]

Now that you are back in your layout you'll notice a rectangle surrounding what appears to be the objects you created back in model space. This is the default viewport AutoCAD creates when you first go through the Page Manager Setup. Delete it.

 

Stop. Look at your screen. Two objects will be visible. They are the paper background/shadow (solid line) and a dashed line representing the printable area. The first represents the size of the paper you selected in the Page Setup Manager and the second defines the limits to which AutoCAD will print. Anything on or over the dashed line will not be printed. Keep this in mind. Let's continue.

 

Switch to your viewport layer. Create a new viewport using the MVIEW command. Start the command and accept the default . You should see a new viewport created and within the viewport you should see your model space objects (site plan boundary and anything, like buildings, within it). Is that what you see?

 

At this point I suggest that you to take a few minutes and read another thread that pertains solely to viewports, their features and their use. Click on the link below. Return here when you're done.

 

http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/showthread.php?72972-Things-you-should-know-about-Viewports.&highlight=maxactvp

[ReMark]

You've returned to your drawing and you want to know "What is my viewport scale and where would I find this information?"

 

Look at the image above. It shows four different ways to determine the viewport scale (circled in red). They are...

 

1. Viewport toolbar (at the top). Position of toolbar, if enabled, will vary by user.

2. Quick Properties window assuming you have this enabled.

3. Properties palette.

4. Status Bar (at the bottom).

 

Choose the option(s) that work best for your situation.

 

Good to go?

[sigaukedenn]

ReMark is very detailed,draw a circle with radius of say250000,select zoom,right click and select zoom extents and save your dwg,from there on you can draw your project in the model space to whatever scale you want.

[ReMark]

sigaukedenn: That is kind of over doing it a bit.

 

If the property is 100'x75' then I would draw nothing larger than a 150'x125' rectangle with the bottom left hand corner located at 0,0. Then go back and draw the site plan itself within this rectangle. See example below. The white box is 150'x125'. The green box with the crossed lines through it represent your site plan (100'x75'). Are we clear?

 

And to repeat, if you draw your model scale objects at FULL size the issue of "scale" can be handle via a layout with a single viewport.

 

Edited November 8, 2013 by ReMark

[ReMark]

This image of a layout shows what your FULL size model space site plan would look like as laid out on a letter size (8.5x11) sheet of paper at an engineering scale of 1"=20'. As you can plainly see the entire property is well within our viewport frame which in this case exactly matches the printable area of our drawing. Even the larger rectangle (150'x125') fits at this scale. You can change scales to make the site plan appear larger or smaller on the sheet as you wish. Now your next question will be "How do I add new scales to the scalelist?" Am I right?

[ReMark]

To add a new scale to our list of scales we have to edit what AutoCAD refers to as the Scale List. One way to do this (Yes, I'm old school, I enter some commands at the command line. Your laughter does not faze me.) is to invoke the SCALELISTEDIT command. That will bring up the window shown in the image above. Notice the "Add" button I've circled to the right. We're going to use this to add the scale of 1"=20'. Ready?

 

Note:

When you work in a layout, the scale factor of a view in a layout viewport represents a ratio between the actual size of the model displayed in the viewport and the size of the layout.

Edited November 8, 2013 by ReMark

[ReMark]

Remember that ratio mentioned in the last line of my previous post? Well this is where we enter it after hitting the Add button. Note the three areas circled in red. The top one is our new scale which in this case is 1"=20'. The next two areas are where we enter the ratio. The ratio really comes into full play when we eventually plot our drawing as AutoCAD will take note of the scale assigned to our viewport and plot everything within it according. The beauty of it is we plot from a layout at 1:1 scale we do not plot "to scale".

 

So in this case the ratio is 1 paper unit represents the equivalent of 240 drawing units. The 240 number is derived from multiplying 20 x 12. If we want a scale of 1"=40' the ration would be 1 = 480 (40 x12). Follow me?

 

This then accounts for how we were able to depict a piece of property that is 100' long on a piece of paper that is 8 1/2" long. At 1"=20' we could, if we went right to the edges of our paper, show a building lot that is 170' but keep in mind we do have a limitation in regards to the printable area of our paper which is probably closer to 7 1/2" or 150' (7.5x20). I'd cut that back just a bit further (wiggle room) and limit myself to a building no longer than 140' at this particular scale. If our building were larger we'd have no option but to use a different scale so we could still fit it on our paper. Whew! That was a mouthful. Have your eyes clouded over and has your brain gone numb by now? Couldn't blame you if it happened. LoL

 

This is a link to a handy chart of CAD scale factors for drawings using the imperials units of Architectural or Engineering.

 

http://archtoolbox.com/representation/cad/19-scalefactor.html

Edited November 8, 2013 by ReMark

[ReMark]

Joe: Have you made any progress yet? Update us please.

[sigaukedenn]

Noted ReMark...