Astcad Design & Drafting

15/10/2026

Production 3D Printing: When Additive Makes Sense for End-Use Parts
Most people meet 3D printing as a prototyping tool: one part, quickly, to check a design. Production 3D printing is a different job. The parts are end-use components, they come in batches, and they have to be the same every…
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15/10/2026

BIM Drafting Services Explained: LOD, BIM Ex*****on Plans and IFC
"BIM drafting" gets used to mean anything from a Revit floor plan to a fully federated, clash-checked model handed over to a facilities team. The difference matters, because it decides what you are paying for, what you receive and whether…
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15/10/2026

Types of Electrical Drawings: SLDs, Schematics, Layouts and Schedules
"Electrical drawings" covers a family of documents, not one. A switchboard builder, an installer on a commercial fit-out and a certifier reviewing a mining substation each need a different drawing, and a set that uses the wrong one for the…
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14/10/2026

Construction Detail Drawings: What They Show and How to Read Them
A general arrangement drawing tells the builder what goes where. A detail drawing tells them how it actually goes together. Most of the questions raised on site, and most of the variations that follow, trace back to a junction that…
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02/10/2026

Designing Parts for 3D Printing: A Practical Guide
Most parts that fail in 3D printing were not badly printed. They were badly drawn for printing. A model that is perfectly valid for machining or injection moulding can be unprintable, fragile, or dimensionally wrong once it comes off the…
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Most parts that fail in 3D printing were not badly printed. They were badly drawn for printing. A model that is perfectly valid for machining or injection

02/10/2026

Engineering Design and Drafting: How They Work Together
"Engineering design" and "drafting" get used almost interchangeably, and on a small job they often are the same person's afternoon. On anything larger they are two distinct activities with different outputs, different risks and a handover between them that decides…
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"Engineering design" and "drafting" get used almost interchangeably, and on a small job they often are the same person's afternoon. On anything larger they

02/10/2026

GD& #038;T Basics for Australian Engineering Drawings
Most drawings tell a workshop how big something is. Far fewer tell it how much the shape itself is allowed to vary — whether a face has to be flat, whether a hole has to be square to that face,…
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Most drawings tell a workshop how big something is. Far fewer tell it how much the shape itself is allowed to vary — whether a face has to be flat, whether a

02/10/2026

AS 3600 Concrete Bearing Under Steel Base Plates
Every steel column eventually hands its load to concrete. The steel side of that handover is well covered — AS 4100 governs the base plate itself, the yield line that sets its thickness, and the welds back to the column.…
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Every steel column eventually hands its load to concrete. The steel side of that handover is well covered — AS 4100 governs the base plate itself, the yield

16/09/2026

Revit Families Explained: System, Loadable and In-Place
The three family types in Revit, when each is correct, type versus instance parameters, shared parameters, and what separates a good family from a slow one.
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System, loadable and in-place Revit families - when each is correct, type versus instance parameters, shared parameters and what makes a family perform.

16/09/2026

AS 1100 Drawing Conventions: Sheets, Line Types, Projection and Title Blocks
What AS 1100 actually governs - sheet sizes, line widths, third-angle projection, preferred scales, title block fields and the checks that catch a bad set.
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AS 1100 explained for drawing sets - sheet sizes, line types and widths, third-angle projection, preferred scales and what a title block must carry.