Training the Trainers

Those of our staff attending Revit training have found some pretty surprising things. Out of the box, Plumbing piping design and Electrical conduit design is lousy - flat out freaking lousy. Mechanically, one can't put an air device into a ceiling (probably an oversimplification of the issue but that's the perception.) Keynotes are almost nonexistent because it is too difficult to do them. I spent a few minutes on the Internet and I've got answers for the Keynotes issue. Then, our Autodesk distributor/trainer tells them don't know when Revit MEP Suite 2009 will be released. Another check on the Inet and I find it had been released a couple days earlier. We're asking for a reduction in the training fees due to these goofups and others.

Sat with one of the mechanical engineers and co-stockholders to review some settings for the mechanical side of Revit. There were some aspects of setting baseline standards that seemed pretty darn repetitive to me. At some point it should ask, "Do you wish to apply this to all ...." I have to figure there is some location in the program to do such, it's just not readily apparent.

Finally finished up a 12,000 art gallery. Not much of itself but it was located at the 1st floor of a 15th floor high-rise. Should have been very easy but the two gallery rooms, large and small, had a 17'6" ceiling height leaving roughly 30" of ceiling space after allowing 8" for lights in the grid. That also meant the two of the seven fan coil units would not fit in that ceiling space. However, the sound level of the fan coil units would have been a problem with the noise. Fortunately there was a service corridor sizeable enough to put six of the seven FCUs above the ceiling.

The day before completion, we found out ceilings in the two gallery spaces were removed at the owner's request. Changes affected our electrical engineer more so than I. Kept the lined ductwork to reduce air borne sound from the fan motor and coverted the flexible runout ducts to rigid sheet metal. It minimized the changes I had to make as we aren't getting picky about additional services for the work; the client is pretty good and we're doing a lot of work with them.

AutoCAD 2008 has been getting flaky on us. Seems like several people have had problems with various aspects of the program. I suspect it's got more to do with us going from R2004 to R2008 and having such a significant change in program capabilities and not fully recognizing how some of our old standards might need changing. One aggravation is the ScaleList and the Xref corruption happening. AutoCAD Labs has issued a fix program for ScaleListEdit that I'll try out on one of my projects and then all of them if it works well.

Next up is 70,000sf tenant finish in the 15-story office building. Simultaneous with that is completion of the CDs design for the 13-story apartment building mentions in prior postings. At least I had this weekend off. Probably working the next couple weekends.