Imperial dimension – metric drawing

One of my colleagues noted that she wanted all her measurements to be in imperial when dimensioning for her client. The drawing had been drawn in metric mm.

Whilst there are ways to convert the drawing in its entirety into imperial and visa versa, there is very little information on temporarily change the units or dimension style.

So here is how to place an imperial dimension on a metric drawing.

First go to the dimension style manager (_DIMSTYLE) and then select your dimension that you will be starting with. In our office we have a dimension style for each scale the drawing will be printed at (we have not got to annotative objects yet…). So I started with 1:100.

Metric Dimstyle, Primary Units tab
Metric Dimstyle, Primary Units tab

Click on new and it will create a new style based on the 1:100 dimension style selected. I renamed the new style to 1:100 feet so its clear that it is a different style but has the scale of 1:100 and is in feet!

Then leave every other setting alone and go to the Primary Units section. Change the unit format to Architectural and the Precision to 0′-0″.

Then change the scale factor to 0.0393700787. This scales the mm in inches. It is the basically the conversion of 1mm to 1inch.

Imperial Dimension (for metric drawing), Primary Units tab
Imperial Dimension (for metric drawing), Primary Units tab

Save style and that’s it. You now have a dimension style that outputs feet and inches from a metric drawing. Even better you can have both metric dimensions and imperial on the same drawing with this method.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.