Mechanical Drafter

>> I take the designs that the engineers send us for our piping systems in large commercial buildings, and we have to find a way to fit them into the building that the architect has designed. They don't always coordinate before they send the design. So my job is to go over their drawings and find a way to make everything fit with duct, with pipe, with structural elements, with fire sprinkler, electrical, architectural things like lights. And once we have that done then we send those drawings to our fabrication shop. And they put the pieces together and then send them out in small enough pieces that they can go out on a truck. And they are labeled and numbered and then they just sort of snap together out in the field, ideally. I end up being sort of a quality control for the designs that I get because if they have -- maybe they've been working in these designs for months or even years and they sometimes miss the same thing that they've been looking at over and over and over. And then I get it and I look at it with fresh eyes. And I say this riser diagrams doesn't match the overhead plan view and can somebody please explain to me if this four-inch line is the same as that six-inch line that connects over in this other room. And so we have to request a lot of information from them. That's the first step usually is asking questions about the design. Probably the first job that I worked on. That was my favorite because when I started on the job I didn't know very much about drafting. I kind of picked it up as I went along. They just said here's AutoCAD and here's a computer and let's see if we can get this steam system drawn for this hospital. And nine months later, the hospital was up, and I actually got to work in the field. And I worked in some of the same parts of the building that I had been drawing.