First week - Getting Comfortable (post #2)

Friday ~ 5/13/2022 ~

Today I made my first real AutoCad design from scratch! Using the specifications from a client, I was able to make the tank below:

Besides that, I did some more title Red Lines for Taylor. This time though, I was more appreciative of her work. I thought that if I understood how it all worked, then I wouldn’t be as impressed by her diagrams, but they are actually really clean and well organized. (Future me note: She helped me with any questions I had about how the software works and the way she gave me work to do to help here was really conducive to help me learn how it works, which was really cool!) In between edits, I started sifting through a 100+ slide presentation to learn how all the different pieces the company worked on came together. Jason, who came back from his business trip today, helped me with questions I had about what was what. He also helped me with the dimensions to the “ribs” of the tank above, since the client didn’t specify. Jason just gave me the industry standard.

Here’s a page of Taylor’s diagrams (sorry it’s blurred, but people pay for these, so I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to show):

Monday  ~ 5/16/2022 ~

Today I learned how to do more Red Lines, but for the actual model part of the system. I learned how to edit “windows”, which was basically a screenshot from another part of the file that you could move around without fear of accidentally messing it up (or using the same screenshot multiple times, just zoomed in or with different labels). To learn that, I edited a much more complex diagram, mostly just changing the diagram’s labels, but also changing a few wires here and there. I also finished the presentation.

Tuesday ~ 5/17/2022 ~

Firstly, I did some more Red Lines for Taylor, and by now I’m pretty comfortable with the program. Because of that, I was able to work with Dann to make another diagram, this one fairly complex, and made changes to it based on how he/the client needed it. (This one I definitely can’t show :/) I’ll give a brief description: Diamond Z has data on a bunch of different oil pipelines, and one company was basically asking where and how they should drain a section of a pipe if need be.

After that, Dann showed me a bunch of physical pieces of the stuff I had looked at in the presentation, giving me a more in depth description of them. It was really cool to hold the things and fiddle with them to see how they worked. One of the main things that a lot of the pieces seem to have in common now is “double walls.” Basically, if the outer wall cracks, liquid spills in and triggers a sensor, allowing people to know it failed. The same thing happens if the inner wall cracks. This is better than a single wall, because it gives the owner a chance to replace the pipe before the supply is lost / contaminated.

Here’s the giant pile of parts I looked through with Dann: