130 — Cast Layout Draw

Cast Layout Draw turns the site into a casting-layout sheet in one click: every panel’s casting outline with its mark, the crane, the crane’s capacity rings and a red unsafe-distance ring, under a title line that totals the set. It also stores a cast record inside the drawing — the list of where each panel is cast — which Crane Capacity Check reads.

The crane picture on this sheet is a planning aid, not an engineering determination. Read this before you use any crane position it shows:

Warning

Crane stations and the slab edge — read this before copying any station shown here.

A crane station must sit entirely outside the wall-clearance standoff, on prepared subgrade, or entirely inboard of the closure strip, on the poured slab. Never between the two, and never spanning the boundary. The test is the machine’s bearing footprint — its tracks or outriggers — not the centre of a drawn circle. One track on poured slab and one on unpoured subgrade gives differential support under the mat; the slab edge spalls or the subgrade settles, and the machine goes out of level under load.

TCA Safety Guideline v13.1 (June 2013) §2 item 6, p.8: “Install entrance and exit ramps for the crane to position itself onto the floor slab. Do not allow the crane to exert its weight on the extreme edge of any portion of the slab.” See also OSHA 29 CFR 1926.1402 — ground conditions; the operator must be notified of bearing capacity, and the controlling entity is responsible for adequate site preparation.

Station placement in this release is a known open defect (CV-2714). The perpendicular standoff is a fixed value that every catalogued machine’s bearing footprint exceeds, so a generated station can straddle the boundary. Do not copy a station position from this lesson, or from its video, onto a real site. Have the setup reviewed against the machine’s bearing footprint and the site’s own closure-strip and brace-line dimensions.

And on this release the drawn frame can be mirrored, which makes an inside/outside verdict untrustworthy whenever it happens. It was measured in coordinates on a saved post-draw drawing rather than inferred: after Site Drawing Options is entered twice, wall-line ends land at the exact Y-mirror of their shipped positions – same X to the hundredth, Y negated – 622 feet apart at the widest, while a point at the origin separates by zero, which is what distinguishes a mirror from a constant shift. Two points were left unmoved, so this is a partial redraw and not a blanket transform of every coordinate. The no-flip control has since been run, and the frame flip IS the cause. An otherwise identical take with no Site Drawing Options entries drew ZERO mirrored points, with all four shipped points unchanged, while the flipped take mirrored two of them. The control was not a null run – it drew ten points against the shipped four, and left fourteen wall-line ends open against the shipped two – so the zero means something. The mirror is therefore not present on an untouched drawing – but the action that brings it on is smaller than it sounds: opening Site Drawing Options twice and then drawing is enough. Measured on the dialog itself, BOTH openings were closed with Esc – no OK, no edit, nothing typed. Backing out of the dialog still sets it. That is still ordinary use and still a defect, but it is narrower than the previous wording implied. The discriminator is clean and the sample is small – four shipped points, on staged copies rather than customer files. An earlier version of this note said the draw refused and therefore nothing reached the sheet; part of it drew, and what drew is mirrored.) So a station reported as clear of the closure strip may not be. Treat every crane position here as illustrative of the workflow only, never as a sited answer.

Where it is

  • Toolbar: ConstructiVision Site & Tools → Cast Layout Draw. Tooltip: “Draw the cast layout for this site”.

  • Typed command: CV-CAST-DRAW.

  • Drawing: a site drawing with its panels attached (Tutorial 11: Attach Panels). No dialog opens and nothing is asked.

Try it on the Sample Building site (CSBsite1)

CSBsite1.dwg is the ConstructiVision Sample Building site, with 59 panels attached.

  1. Open CSBsite1.dwg, with the Sample Building panel drawings (CSB001 to CSB060) in the same folder.

  2. Click Cast Layout Draw.

  3. The command line first warns that it will act on every panel:

    [CAST] NO PANELS WERE PRE-SELECTED, so this acts on EVERY panel on the site. That is the
product rule, not a fault -- but if you meant to change only some of them, stop now, select
those panels, and run it again.

  4. It stores the cast record, then reports the rings, where the weights came from, and the totals:

    [CAST] cast record stored in the drawing: 59 panel(s) (CV-3369)
[CAST] red unsafe-distance ring at 85 ft for heaviest panel P18 (33.4 t): inside it every
panel in the layout can be picked.
[CAST] 1 capacity ring label(s) had no clear slot and stay above their ring.
[CAST] weights: all 59 from each panel's drawn solid (CV-2657).
[CAST] 59 panels (16 staged interior); 1444 t; crane LR1300 @ (1865,-1626).

  5. On the test computer the command took about half a minute, and the drawing stayed in plan view.

Reading the result

The sheet is drawn above and around the site plan:

  • The title line reads CONSTRUCTION LAYOUT (cast-IN)  59 panels  1444 t  pick 1-59  crane LR1300  (16 staged interior).

  • The red-ring line above it reads RED RING = UNSAFE BEYOND 26m (85ft) -- heaviest panel P18 33.4t. The red ring itself is drawn around the crane and marked UNSAFE.

  • Each panel is drawn as a red casting outline carrying its mark (P1 to P59).

  • The crane is one block, labelled LR1300 300t crawler, with its capacity rings around it. On CSBsite1 it is drawn at the centre of the panel set — the same point, (1865,-1626), that Construction Layout IN reports as the set’s centroid. This site has no closed slab outline, so nothing has checked that position against a slab edge.

  • Weights come from each panel’s own drawn solid (weights: all 59 from each panel's drawn solid). The 1444 t in the title line is their total.

The cast record, and what reads it

Cast Layout Draw keeps the cast record inside the site drawing — no extra file is written beside it. On the test run the drawing’s folder held the same two text files before and after (wcl-recovery.txt and wcl.txt), and the site record gained a cast section of 59 rows, one per panel.

Crane Capacity Check (ConstructiVision Crane toolbar) is the button that uses it. Its tooltip: “Score EVERY panel against one crane position and report only the refusals. Needs the cast record that Cast Draw or Construction Layout stores in the drawing, so run one of them first. Report only – draws nothing”.

On CSBsite1, straight after Cast Layout Draw:

  1. Click Crane Capacity Check.

  2. At Crane centre: type a point. The test run typed 1924,-1930.38, the middle of the site’s wall-line extents — not the point where Cast Layout Draw drew the crane.

  3. The check names the crane chart it used, then lists only the panels it refuses, one line each, for example:

    [CHECK] lr1300 (published chart)
  P59  NO   governed at SET -- NO-BOOM-SOLUTION  cast r=80ft  set r=162ft  load 18.6 t  cap 14.0 t  [net of hook block 5.5 t; rigging NOT deducted (no allowance set)]

  4. It ends with the count:

    [CHECK] 3 feasible, 56 refused, of 59 panels.

Each refusal line says whether the cast radius or the set radius governed, the two radii, the panel load, and the chart capacity. The line also says what was and was not deducted: the hook block was, rigging was not.

What this lesson does not cover

  • Casting only some panels. With nothing selected the command acts on every panel; the command line says you can select panels first to limit it. That was not tried here.

  • Choosing the crane. The run above drew an LR1300.

  • A sited crane position. See the warning at the top of this page.

Watch the lesson

A companion video for this lesson is planned alongside the written curriculum.