Blueprints
You have made this drawing a hundred times.
Some parts are not design work. An O-ring gland, a shim, a standoff, a spacer: you know what the sheet has to say before you open the model. A Blueprint is that sheet, set up once inside Drafter. After that, it can be repeated inside SolidWorks or Siemens NX with one click: your views, your tolerances and your note block, the same way every time.
Your blueprints
Drawing
Part setup
- Process
- CNC machining
- Material
- 6061-T6
- Finish
- As machined
Note tags
Pick the part. The drawing is already made.
A Blueprint is built from a drawing you have already approved: which views the part needs, which dimensions matter, what the tolerance defaults are, what the note block says. Everyone on the team makes the same drawing, every time.
Teamwide standardization.
Twelve engineers produce twelve drawings of the same bracket because the standard lives in twelve heads. A Blueprint is where you put it down, and it is not a style guide nobody opens: it is the thing that actually makes the drawing. Change it once and the next hundred sheets change with it.
See what ships on a sheet
- Views
- Which, and where
- Dimensions
- The ones that matter
- Tolerances
- Your defaults
- Notes
- Your block
- Title block
- Yours
- Sheet
- Your size and border
- Standard
- ASME Y14.5-2018
- Set up
- Once
Capabilities
What a Blueprint carries.
One click, inside your CAD
Blueprints run from the Drafter add-in in SolidWorks and Siemens NX, so making the drawing does not mean leaving the model or opening another application.
A family, not a part
One Blueprint covers the whole family. The next size, the next bore, the next thickness comes back with its own dimensions read off its own model.
Your conventions, applied
Your sheet size, your default tolerance and your title block, on every part in the family and every time anybody on the team runs it.
ASME Y14.5-2018 underneath
A template decides the layout and the defaults. What it does not do is change the rule set: the callouts on the sheet still follow the 2018 standard.
Change the model, run it again
A Blueprint drawing is not a flat file. When the part changes, the sheet regenerates against the template rather than being re-detailed by hand.
The note block comes with it
Templated notes are part of the Blueprint, and the notes this particular part earns are added on top of them. See Notes for how that decision is made.
The long tail
Most of your drawings are not new.
Sort last quarter's drawings by how much thought each one took. The top of that list is why you hire engineers. The bottom is the same six shapes at forty sizes, redrawn every time someone needs the next one, and it gets worse as the team grows.
See how the notes get on the sheetQuestions
What teams ask about templates.
- Who builds the template?
- You do, from a drawing you have already approved, so the first Blueprint is a sheet your team has signed rather than a guess. We set the first few up with you when you start.
- What happens when the next part is a different size?
- It still works. A Blueprint is set up against the shape of the part rather than one part's numbers, so the next size in the family comes back with its own dimensions, read off its own model.
- What about a part that does not match any Blueprint?
- It goes through Assembly, which details it from scratch: reading the model, proposing the datums and tolerances, and returning a standardized sheet. Blueprints is the fast path for the parts you have already decided about, not a gate in front of the product.
- Is this different from Assembly, or the same thing with a template?
- The same thing with your template in front of it. Assembly reads a model and decides how to draw it; a Blueprint is you making that decision once, in advance, for a part you draw constantly. The drawing that comes out is the same kind of drawing.
- Can two teams keep different Blueprints for the same part?
- Yes. Blueprints live in your workspace and belong to whoever you say they belong to, which matters at companies where a program has its own drafting conventions and is not going to give them up.
- Do I still get to change the drawing?
- Always. A Blueprint decides where the drawing starts, not where it ends. Nothing is locked, and the sheet is yours to edit before anybody signs it.
The rest of Drafter
Four more products, on the same models.
Assembly
Send the assembly and get a dimensioned, toleranced sheet back for every part in it, to ASME Y14.5-2018 and in your title block.
See AssemblyNotes
Your standard notes, plus the ones this particular part earns from its material, its process and its features, placed as soon as the drawing exists.
See NotesMBD
Model-based definition from the same read of the geometry: the tolerances attached to the faces they control, for teams whose downstream reads the model.
See MBDRedliner
Upload any drawing, ours or a supplier's, and get it checked against ASME Y14.5 and what the floor actually needs, with the rule behind every finding.
See the Redliner