Had a chat with an old surveyor that made me rethink my dims

I was double-checking some boundary lines on a project last week and an older surveyor I know walked over and said, 'you drafters put too much trust in what you see on the screen.' He pointed out that a 0.05 offset in a property line I had drawn was actually matching a 30-year-old iron pin he found in the field. It got me thinking, how often are we blindly following the digital file instead of leaving room for field verification on our drawings?

3 comments

3 Comments

avery_jackson19d ago

The 'too much trust in what you see on the screen' line hit home. I had a job last month where my CAD file showed a fence line dead straight, but the old pins in the ground told a different story with a slight curve. Turns out the original survey from 1985 had a handwritten note about a tree that shifted the line, but nobody ever digitized that info. Now I always make a note on my drawings that says 'verify with field pins' on any boundary that looks too perfect. You really can't beat what's actually in the ground, can you?

cora51819d ago

Found something similar on an old farm survey last fall. The deed said the line went straight east for 800 feet, but there was this massive oak tree right in the middle of where the line should have been. Looked in the old county records and there was a note from the original 1920s surveyor saying he 'bent the line around the big oak to save the tree.' Nobody had ever added that to the digital plat. Spent a whole afternoon walking the property with the farmer to find all the original pins and then re-drew the whole thing by hand. The digital file had just been copying errors for almost a hundred years.

phoenix24619d ago

The real kicker is that oak might be worth more now than the land itself, @cora518, makes you wonder how many other boundary trees got saved by someone with enough pride in their work to bend a line.