TheMinistryCafe

I thought I’d start a small series on my favorite topic…technology. Whether its computers, display screens, speakers, or software, I like the stuff that makes our lives easier, makes us more effective at work, and changes the way we accomplish things. I’ll be blogging about some of the equipment we have around the office which helps us accomplish our work, and some of the new technologies out there and how they relate to churches. First up: one of the larger pieces of office equipment we have around here.

A lot of our work as architects is related to paper. While our designs get drawn on the computer, it is with the paper drawings produced from those files that the building is presented to the church, submitted for permits, and finally built from. As a result the plotter we use to produce those drawings becomes an important link for what we do.

A couple of years ago Jeff went looking for a new large format copier for our office, as our old one was rather long in the tooth. What we ended up going with was a good bit more than a copier as it would also become our main plotter. This however, was quite a departure from our previous plotters. It’s a Xerox XES 8825, but I affectionately call it “The Behemoth”.

The manual states it weighs in at a hefty 620 pounds. It has the footprint of your typical banquet table, but is a solid 4 feet high as well. This thing plots a 30 by 42 inch sheet in an astonishing 4 or 5 seconds, when our other plotter takes a good 2 minutes. When you start to multiply that by 30 sheets for a typical job, it really adds up. With 500 feet long rolls of paper and a large paper tray it can plot non-stop for a good 70 sheets or more. The machine is from the low end of a line that is made for reprographic companies, the kind of place where volume, speed, and economy are king.

Then there’s the scanner. Made to work with the plotter for copying duties, it also scans to computer files. At 36” wide, it’s hard to imagine coming across a sheet of paper too big to fit. It can be set up to scan something mounted to a rigid board. When producing computer files, it has a background suppression feature that determines what areas of the page are simply whitespace, greatly reducing the file size of less intense drawings. That feature works so well, I prefer to scan small pieces on that instead of using our smaller flatbed scanner. I always feel a little silly centering an 8 ½ by 11 sheet on the 36” slot, but the scanner doesn’t complain.

It’s not without its drawbacks. It was such a revolution in how we plot, that it took a lot of getting used to. I’ll admit it is not very user friendly, I probably get more questions about that machine than all the other office machines put together.

Almost every church has the original drawings of their existing buildings. But the drawings end up stuffed away in some utility closet slowly decaying away or possibly forgotten. With the “Behemoth” we like to scan those drawings to computer files to keep them from getting lost in our office and allow marks to be made on our copy of those drawings. Feel free to ask for a CD with those files on it should you choose us as your church architect. While the CD might still get lost, new drawings could be printed at your local printing company when that roll in the closet gets wet and moldy.

From copying original drawings of existing buildings to scanning consultant files for future plots to quickly producing construction document sets, having this tool in-house is a great advantage for us and our clients.