Scale Question

Recent scenario - looking for clarification:

AI didn't take care of the scales on exterior elevations of an apartment building. Scale was 1/8", so I chose that on the dropdown. I went to verify on the floor elevations, and the measurement was a little off. In effort to be as accurate as possible, I manually scaled the page based on floor elevations (vertically).

Everything checked out vertically, but I didn't have any horizontal dimensions, so I rolled with it.

Fast forward to post-bid, I come to find out the x-axis was real funky and my quantity was double what it was supposed to be. Only found out because the GC was nice enough to verify our quantities were correct.

How did this happen or what did I do wrong? Any advice on how to prevent from happening in the future?

Appreciate everyone in the ZZ community!

Lorin Allred zzTakeoff1h 50m

Hey Jordan, sorry that happened! In some cases, if the scale doesn't line up, the PDF could have been re-exported at the incorrect size/page ratio (usually letter/legal sized pdfs), which can cause the displayed scale to be inaccurate, as the PDF has extra padding on the sides. If that is the case, we've asked users in the past to reach back out to whoever gave them the PDF to ask for a corrected one. Other times, it could be that whoever drew the plans used the incorrect scale, and depending on what type of takeoff you are doing, there could be a different page scale for X and Y.

I'm sure other estimators could chime in with their feedback/experience with this.

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