Eleventh Edition of the Drawing Requirements
Manual Bridges Past and Future

The Drawing Requirements Manual has been completely revised and updated, and now in its eleventh edition, it serves as a definitive guide for development and use of digital models and drawings in government and commercial technical data packages. Bryan Fischer, a member of ASME and a leading subject-matter expert in GD&T, dimensional management, tolerance analysis, and drawing standards, authored the revision. The project involved more than a year’s worth of work. “The project was tremendous,” Fischer said. “It was big in scope, a lot bigger than I expected. The book is something like 1,200 pages, now that I’ve added a new chapter to it.”

The work encompassed a number of important goals, the first of which was to take the tenth edition of the Drawing Requirements Manual (2000) and bring it up to date with the current editions of all the standards referenced in it. “There were about 750 standards,” Fischer said, “and of those, we had to look at about 400. For many of those, nothing more than the date had changed. Or a lot of them were no longer valid—outdated military standards. That was actually a tremendous challenge in and of itself, trying to figure out which standard had changed, how it had changed, was the change relevant, and in the case of military and government standards, a lot of them were canceled. What replaced them? Very challenging.” Fischer approached that challenge with intensive and exhaustive research. “The main research tool I used was the newly updated IHS Standards Expert database. I made a few phone calls to people I know who are in various departments of Defense and at ASME, but it was primarily online research using IHS tools.”

An important development for this eleventh edition appears on its cover in its subtitle, Guide for Digital and Traditional Drawings, Models, and Related Data Packages, including Commercial and Military Requirements. This subtitle reflects another of the critical goals of the revision. “There had been an eight-year lapse since the tenth edition,” Fischer noted. “The goal was to reinforce the existing content, to complement it and bring it up to date, and a big part of what we were trying to do was update the content in terms of the way we use computers and digital data today.” As part of that effort, Fischer authored an entirely new chapter, Section 26, Digital Data Sets and 3D Solid Modeling, which sets out rules, techniques, and practices for the preparation, annotation, revision, and use of 3D solid model data sets.

Refining the entire 1,200+-page document, Fischer worked to make document more accurate when necessary and more pertinent when possible, improving ambiguous passages and addressing obsolete practices. He aimed to modernize the document to reflect the way the government and industry are doing business today, adopting the idea that 3D solid modeling is the preferred method of deliverables to the government and advising on compliance with MIL-DTL-31000C (2004) Technical Data Packages.

In addition, Fischer discovered another element of change that would run through the entire book. “One of the things that really surprised me,” he said, “was the way the U.S. Government’s Acquisition Reform policy had changed.” Over the years, since its origins in 1969, the Drawing Requirements Manual (DRM) had evolved from one whose purpose was military to one whose scope also included commercial projects. In the tenth edition, enormous care was taken to clarify the government’s acquisition policy, which stated that because the government would no longer act as a standards-developing organization, commercial standards would be preferred and it would be necessary to obtain a waiver if there was an intent to use or reference a government/military standard. In 2005, the requirement for waivers was dismissed. That development “didn’t change the document that much,” Fischer said, “but it affected every single section, and it changed the flavor of the whole book.”

Part of Fischer’s struggle in the revision of the DRM was to end up with a document that could both look to engineering’s history and point to its future. He worked “with an eye to the past,” he said, “not getting rid of information that people may still need if they’re using those old methods, working on older projects. There are a lot of old projects out there, specifically big government projects, where the drawings may still be on paper, probably not computer-generated.” Projects exist today whose original designs were created decades ago. Today’s engineers may have to rely on yesterday’s artifacts. “We didn’t want to take out that content and leave those people without the support they needed.” But, with acute awareness of the needs of the future, he said, “we also wanted to bring them up to date on everything in the book for the way it’s being done today. We were trying to reach that continuum between was and is.”

Bryan Fischer is the owner of Advanced Dimensional Management LLC, whose website can be found at http://www.advdm.com. 

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