Structural Drafting Services

Our structural drafting service takes structural engineering design and produces the documentation a fabricator or builder works from — general arrangement drawings, connection details, and fully detailed shop and erection drawings for structural steel and, where scoped, concrete detailing.

We work from the structural engineer's design (drawings, model or calculations) and produce detailing that reflects real fabrication and erection practice — member sizes, connection types, bolt patterns and welds that a workshop can price and build from without rework. A drawing that is technically accurate but impractical to fabricate is not actually a useful drawing, and we treat constructability as part of the detailing brief, not an afterthought.

Where a project is being run in Revit or Tekla, we can produce or work within a structural BIM model, keeping detailing coordinated with architectural and services models and supporting clash detection before fabrication. This coordination step is where a lot of expensive on-site rework gets prevented — a beam that clashes with a duct is far cheaper to fix on screen than after the steel has been delivered to site.

Connection detailing deserves particular care because it's where the majority of fabrication queries originate. We detail connections to reflect the specified capacity and construction category from the engineer's design, and flag anywhere the practical fabrication approach might differ from a purely theoretical connection so it can be confirmed before steel is cut.

Material take-offs and bolt lists are produced directly from the detailed model or drawing set, not as a separate manual exercise, which keeps quantities consistent with what's actually shown on the drawings — a common and costly failure point when take-offs are done independently of the detailing itself.

For projects that move through multiple revisions as the design develops, we maintain a clear audit trail of what changed between issues, which matters enormously on structural work where a missed connection change can mean re-fabricating a piece that's already been cut and welded.

Structural drafting quality is also about anticipating where the drawing set will actually be read under pressure — a fabricator pricing a tender against a tight deadline, or a foreman on site during erection trying to resolve a query without stopping the crew. Drawings that are clear enough to be read quickly under those conditions, not just technically correct in isolation, are what actually keep a project moving.

We also pay attention to how a drawing set ages over the life of a project. A structural package issued for tender, then revised through design development, then reissued for construction, needs each stage's issue clearly distinguishable from the last — not just by a revision letter, but by a clear understanding of what actually changed and why, so nobody downstream has to reverse-engineer the difference between two drawing issues by comparing them line by line.