Paper engineering drawings, redrawn as manufacturable CAD
Your part drawings are in a filing cabinet, and the one person who knows which revision is current is retiring. This is the work of turning that archive into drawings your business owns, can send to a supplier, and can prove.
Nobody converts a drawing archive because it seemed like a good idea
There is always a trigger. If one of these is yours, the job is probably already overdue.
Someone is retiring
The drawings are legible but only one person knows which revision is actually being made. That knowledge leaves with them.
An ISO audit is coming
The auditor asks for the drawing register. There is a filing cabinet, an out-of-date spreadsheet, and a folder of scans.
You are moving to a new ERP or MRP system
The system needs part numbers and drawings. What exists will not import.
You have bought a business
The drawings came with it. Nobody has established what is current, what is superseded and what is fiction.
Most UK paper-to-CAD is sold to architects
Search for it and you will find scanning bureaux and CAD firms whose work is record drawings, floor plans and Scan to BIM, sold to building services consultants — and an offshore supply that will always be cheaper than us. Both can convert a drawing. Neither can tell you it is wrong.
We read your drawings as manufacturing information: tolerances, fits, material specifications, weld symbols, the general tolerance in the title block that half the archive relies on. And where the part still exists, we can measure it.
How a conversion actually runs
Send five drawings
Representative ones, not the tidiest. We convert one as a sample so you can see the output, and quote the rest from evidence rather than guesswork.
Triage the archive
Which drawings earn their conversion, which get scanned to PDF as a record, and which describe parts nobody has made this decade. This usually removes a substantial share of the cost before it is incurred.
Redraw, and query what does not add up
Each drawing redrawn as CAD rather than auto-traced, with contradictions, missing tolerances and illegible dimensions raised rather than invented. Where the part exists, we can measure it.
Number, control and register
A numbering system, a revision protocol and a register — what turns a folder of files into documentation your quality system can stand behind. Drawing registers and technical documentation
Priced per drawing, in packs
Per-sheet pricing is how this market already works. The difference is that we will tell you the number.
A single machined part on A4 is not a fabricated assembly on A0 with forty balloons and a weld schedule, so a rate quoted before we have seen your archive would be fiction. Send five representative drawings and we price the packs against what is actually in your cabinet.
- Pack of 10
- The usual starting point. Enough to prove the output and settle the format before you commit further.
- Pack of 25
- Typically the parts still in production, or one product family.
- Pack of 50
- Where a rate per drawing starts to matter more than the pack price.
- Larger libraries
- Quoted against the triage, in stages, with a rate agreed up front.
Straight answers
This is the real situation in most archives, and the question the rest of the market does not answer. A part gets modified on the shop floor, the change works, and the drawing is never redlined. Convert that drawing faithfully and you have carefully preserved a document describing a part nobody has made since 2011.
So we flag contradictions rather than converting through them, and where the part still exists we measure it and check the recovered drawing against the thing itself. That is the main reason to have this work done by an engineering business rather than a document business.
Most archives contain a great deal that is not worth the money. The ones worth doing are usually parts still in production, parts with a long lead time or a single source, safety-related components, anything a customer might ask you to prove, and anything only one person understands. Everything else can be scanned to PDF and left as a record.
And yes, in stages — which is why it is priced in packs rather than as one project. A four-thousand-drawing archive does not have to be a four-thousand-drawing decision.
Controlled CAD and PDF drawings in a consistent format and numbering system, a drawing register you can point an auditor at, and a written record of every drawing we queried and what was decided. That last item is usually the one people did not know they needed.
The originals come back to you once you have signed off the converted set — and do not destroy them on the strength of a conversion you have not checked.
Send five drawings and we will convert one.
Photographs of them are enough to start. You will get one converted drawing back, a note of anything on it that did not add up, and a price for the rest of the archive based on your drawings rather than an average.