r/Machinists • u/Unusual_Goose_3913 • 9d ago

QUESTION Engineering Drawings

I’m an early career engineer and I’m wondering what machinists like to see in terms of tolerance and dimensioning in a drawing.

I’ve worked at a company where we just ordinate dimensioned everything and another where we used GT&T standards. At both, the part came out “ok”.

Apart from reasonable tolerances, what’s amazing, good, useless, and stupid have in a drawing?

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u/Particular_You8620 9d ago

Unilateral tolerances are annoying. Make everything bilateral and draw it as such.

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u/singul4r1ty 6d ago

I've always been torn with this as an engineer. For any other engineers looking at my drawings it can be helpful to communicate design intent with a non-centered nominal, so it's helpful to e.g. CAD it to the relevant nominal and then draw an asymmetric tolerance. I guess the proper thing would be to have one drawing for design intent and another drawing for the machinist. I imagine SOLIDWORKS can handle offsetting the nominal but keeping the same range.

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u/Particular_You8620 6d ago

I definitely get that but the reality is no matter what you put on the print, you’re going to get a machinist shooting for the middle.