Structural Drawings, CAD Drafting and BIM Modeling Services

Drawings are the deliverable. Everything else in a structural practice is internal: the client sees drawings, the authority reviews drawings, and the contractor builds from drawings. Which makes it strange that drafting is usually the most under-resourced function in the office. RIH Engineering provides outsourced structural drafting and structural BIM modeling as a dedicated production team working to your standards.

What you get

• General arrangement drawings, structural layouts and section drawings
• Structural drawings for slabs, beams, columns, foundations, staircases and walls
• Structural BIM modeling in Revit and Tekla, coordinated with architecture and MEP
• Structural 3D modeling for clash detection and coordination
• As-built drawing production from site markups and survey data
• Drawing register and revision control you can audit, with revision clouds applied consistently
• Title blocks, layers, line weights and annotation to your office standard, not ours
• Sheet set production and issue packages formatted for authority submission

What we handle for you

Drafting is where the practice's standards live, and where they most often break down. When the office is busy, drawings get produced by whoever is free, the layer standard drifts, title blocks go out inconsistent, and the drawing register stops matching what was actually issued. Then a revision goes out against the wrong base and someone builds from it.

We run drafting as a controlled production function. You give us your CAD standard, your title block and your template. We work inside it, maintain the drawing register, and apply revision control properly. The output looks like your office produced it, because it is produced to your standard.

The cost of doing this in-house

Drafting hours are the easiest to underestimate and the hardest to recover. A full structural package for a mid-size building runs to dozens of sheets, each needing production, checking and revision cycles. Practices routinely spend more hours on drafting and revisions than on the engineering those drawings represent.

And drafting capacity is what caps your throughput. You can design faster than you can draft, so the drawing queue decides how many projects you can run. That means every project you turn away for capacity reasons is, in practice, a drafting constraint rather than an engineering one. The work goes to a competitor, and competitors who solved their drafting bottleneck keep taking it.

Why RIH Engineering is safe to try

Send us one drawing package. We produce it to your CAD standard, your title block and your layer convention, against an agreed date. You open the files and check them against your own drawings. If the standard is not matched, we fix it and reissue at no cost.

Under our dedicated resource model you get named drafters assigned to your account. They learn your standard once, then apply it consistently across every project, which is what makes outsourced drafting look like in-house drafting. 6,500+ designs delivered sits behind the team.

Our process

1. You send your CAD standard, title block, template files, layer convention and the design information to be drafted
2. We produce a sample sheet first and issue it for your approval, so standards are confirmed before volume production starts
3. Drawings drafted in AutoCAD, or modelled in Revit or Tekla where the project is BIM-based
4. Structural model coordinated against architectural and MEP models, with clashes raised as a batch
5. Internal check carried out against the design information, drawing by drawing, before issue
6. Drawing register compiled and maintained, with revision clouds and revision history applied consistently
7. Sheet set assembled and formatted for the intended use: authority submission, tender or construction issue
8. Package issued with native files, so you own and can revise everything we produce

Tools and standards

Our drafting and BIM team works in AutoCAD, Revit Structure and Tekla Structures, with Navisworks and Trimble Connect for coordination and clash detection. Native files are always handed over, so nothing is locked in our office.

We work to your office CAD standard as the default. Where you do not have one documented, we can work to common standards such as BS 1192 or the US National CAD Standard, and we will document what we applied so it is repeatable. For UAE submissions we format drawing packages to suit the relevant authority requirements, which since the Dubai Building Code now run on a single basis across Dubai Municipality, DDA, Trakhees and DSOA.

Client-preferred tools: Our team can be trained to use the tool preferred by the client. If your workflow depends on a specific platform, template or drafting standard, we adapt to it rather than force you into ours.

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