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Monday, August 13, 2007

I took over this project for someone in my office. It was working on coordination plans for a rather large office building. Coordination plans are when you stick all the HVAC duct, equiptment, and registers on one drawing along with the lights and sprinkler pipes and whatever else might be in the ceiling (like smoke detectors, fire alarms, projectors...etc.). Then you look around the drawing to see what sort of mistakes you can find (like a sprinkler on a light or a register over a light or a sprinkler pipe running through a duct...). So you mark all of those down and circle them on the drawing (this might give you a picture of how messy these drawings are with everything on them, you can't see the circles normally because they blend in with everything else, you can get a little cross eyed sometimes staring at the drawing). Then after you have circled everything you see, you get to pull out the ceiling plan and roof plan and figure out how much space is actually in the ceiling and if you have too much stuff jammmed up them (example: a 12 inch duct running over a 6 inch light in only 12 inches of clearance... there is a problem there and it is my job to find it). It gets a little bit tricky when the roof is sloped and you have to figure out the pitches of the roof, but I really enjoyed it. I worked on this project for over 48 hours, two weeks ago. I found 107 errors in the drawing (or as we call them, possible conflicts).

So the guy I was doing them for, because he is so busy with other work, went down to take these drawings to the owner and builder in Tennessee. They were looking over the drawings and commented about how nice they looked and how impressed they were with all the different conflicts we found (because it is better to know that there are problems now before the building is built).

The guy I was doing them for says, "Well, I couldn't have done them without Faith."
Of course he knew he meant me and so did one of the other guys who works with me, but everyone else in the room got really quiet and just looked at him very oddly, like what do we say to that?
Then the other guy who went down there says, "That is our summer mechanical intern."

heh. My name is quite a amusing.

4 comments:

  1. As did I!

    It's exciting seeing all your studying paying off and how it works in the 'real world'. Sounds like fun, and I'd hire you if I need my errors found.

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  2. So THAT's what you do! S-l-o-w-l-y I am figuring it out...

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  3. Well, normally I design HVAC systems and the piping systems for buildings. But we also do coordination drawings. I think they are more fun because they are like a big treasure hunt or hidden picture puzzle.

    And that is just what the boring Mechanical engineers do. The cool ones design anything, cars, power tools, buildings, medical equipment, toys, amusements rides, etc.

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