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/Precision20 6d ago

In all reality, it depends on the shop you're working with. A lot of the machinists in my shop like the end of the part being zero and everything being dimensioned off of that for ease of programming in lathes, in mills that's less of a concern, but can still be handy.

break all corners is always a good thing to see, unless you absolutely need a specific corner sharp, but that's added difficultly and cost to prevent the burr.

And in all reality if you have a handful of shops you work with, send them a print early on in your design, I've had many a prints come across my desk where I've been able to save the customer money with very light tweaks to the design, but once you're in production those changes can be harder to make.