Hello and welcome to this blog post. As an architect it’s always been a challenge to quickly and easily determine the scale of a CAD drawing or to change it to a new one. thus I have programmed a little application called Scale Calculator which addresses that very problem. It’s not extremely polished but I’ve decided to share it with you guys here, hoping that it will help you in your day to day life working with technical drawings of various scales.
Edit: Scale calculator is now a web application, start running it right in your browser. click here.
Click here to download the application.
How to use the application:
Scale Calculator is extremely easy and self explanatory to use, all you really need to do is to download the installer from the link above and go through the simple installation process. once that’s done, a new icon should appear on your desktop with the name Scale Calculator. Once you open that up, you’re greeted with a super simple user interface. The application has two major functionalities:
- Scale Finder: this functionality asks for a dimension from the drawing and it’s real-world value to find the scale of the drawing (units are irrelevant as long as the same unit is used for both inputs, e.g. in a 1:100 drawing, a 1m wide door measures exactly 1cm. So the user needs to input something like this: drawing dimension = 0.01 and real dimension = 1).
- Scale Converter: this functionality asks the user to input the current and the desired scale in n:n format (1:100 or 1:25) and it calculates the factor by which the drawing should be enlarged or reduced (simply multiply the drawing by the given factor inside of AutoCad or a similar drafting application).
It’s true that most of the time we tend to use a small number of scales in our day to day lives and it’s very easy to convert them on the fly, but every now and then we might come across an irregular scale factor, this is when this tool might come in handy. Anyways I hope this post delivers some value to you and have an amazing day!
CodedBIM 