Debate: Is it better to fix a drafting mistake on the fly or start over from scratch?

Last Tuesday I drew a 30-foot section of plumbing wrong in a commercial building layout, and I spent an hour trying to patch it before my lead drafter said just scrap it and redo it, so which way do you lean when things go sideways?

3 comments

3 Comments

garcia.casey8d agoMost Upvoted

Redrew a whole electrical riser diagram once after spending a solid hour trying to patch a wire numbering fiasco. My mentor just looked at me and said "you're digging yourself deeper, just kill it." That fresh version took maybe 15 minutes and I caught two other mistakes I had missed in the first go. Starting clean forces you to slow down and check everything step by step, which sounds backwards but it actually saves time in the end. Have you tried that approach with your plumbing layout yet?

the_ben1mo ago

A buddy of mine spent three hours trying to fix a misaligned foundation plan in AutoCAD once, just kept adding notes and patches. His boss finally walked over, deleted the whole file, and made him start fresh in ten minutes. He said learning when to let go saved him more time than any fix ever could.

harper_smith1mo ago

Absolutely been there. Spent a whole afternoon tweaking a brick pattern on a retaining wall in Revit, adjusting every single joint and module because I was convinced I could make it work. My senior tech came over, looked at it for maybe two seconds, and just said "delete that layer and start from your main grid again." It was humbling but he was totally right, that fresh start took maybe twenty minutes and looked cleaner than anything I had been fighting with for hours. Sometimes you just gotta kill your darlings and move on.