Engineering Drawing Standards
Design Standards
BS 8888 Technical Product Documentation (TPD)Specification for defining, specifying and graphically representing products.
Note: The current edition is BS 8888:2011
This British Standard supersedes BS308-1:1993, BS308-2:1985 and BS308-3:1990, which are all withdrawn. Drawing conventions which applied to BS 308-1'2'3 in general
also apply to the European Standards referenced in BS 8888.
This standard is provided to unify all of the recently implemented ISO and EN ISO standards related to
Technical Product Documentation (it references them). Most designers and engineers should have no difficulty in working to the new
standards. BS 8888 references standards covering all aspects of technical product
documentation including:
- Engineering Flow Diagrams,
- Representation of Engineering components,
- Lettering,
- Units/ quantities,
- Tolerancing,
- Geometric Product Specifications,
- Orthographic/Axonometric representation,
- Handling of Computer based information
- Metrology etc. etc.
An important difference between BS 308 and BS 8888 is in the marking of
the decimal place. In BS308 the decimal place is indicated with a
decimal point. In BS 8888 the decimal place is indicated with a comma
with each group of three digits from the decimal provided with a space e.g. 14 234,012 8 .
For manual drawings this is not really a
problem. For Autocad drawings on a Windows based PC it is most convenient set the decimal
point to display as a comma on the regional settings on the control panel (This option is available
if you set the Country to German or France). .
BS 8888 Book
British Standards are supplying a book which provides clear information on the application of BS 8888. The book is titled
BIP 2155:2009 The Essential Guide to Technical Product Specification: Engineering Drawing . {Neil Phelps and Colin Simmons]
BS 8888 Nominative Reference
In Appendix A of BS 8888 a list of Nominative reference standards is provided. These standards contain the detailed requirements which must by met for claiming complience with BS 8888. The pages linked below include the majority of these standards
- General principles kit
- Tolerancing and dimensioning kit
- Computer aided engineering kit
- Design Management
- Added Standards in 2004