Cutsheets, CAD and BIM: What We Have and What We Do Not

A recurring shape appears in the queries that reach this site: people are not looking for a product, they are looking for a file. A cutsheet for a lock. A DraftSight or DWG model. A BIM object with a ficha técnica. A sample PDF. In one case somebody pasted an entire bill-of-materials line — drawing number, position, material, application — straight into a search box, which is what a purchasing engineer does when they are trying to find the part that satisfies a drawing. Those are all the same request underneath: give me something I can put into my own document.

So here is the honest inventory, in the order of how much of it exists.

Dimensioned line drawings: 79 of them, published on the product pages that have them. They are drawn 1:1 from the dimensions the catalogue publishes for that model — backset, centre distance, faceplate, case size, fixing centres — and they are orthographic, so nothing is foreshortened and a measurement taken off one is a real measurement. They exist for 79 models rather than for the whole catalogue for one reason: those are the models where the factory has given us enough published dimensions to draw without inventing anything. A drawing with a guessed hole position is worse than no drawing, because it will be believed.

Specifications: on every product page, as a table rather than as prose. Backset, centre distance, material, finish codes, cycle life where it has been tested, door thickness range, handing. Where a value is missing it is missing, not estimated. If you need those in a spreadsheet rather than a page, ask and we will send them.

Catalogues: two PDFs, both current. The Canton Hyland product catalogue and a HYDE export catalogue with specifications and an index. The second one matters more than it sounds, because it is a text PDF rather than a scan — the words in it are selectable and searchable, which means a search engine and an AI assistant can read it. The old scanned catalogue contained zero words as far as any machine was concerned.

Test documents: available on request, with their exact scope. We publish the facts of each one — laboratory, reference number, issue date and the specific model covered — and send the document through the proper route when a specification needs it. There is a separate article on why the scope line matters more than the headline.

Now the part we do not have. There is no BIM library. No Revit families, no IFC objects, no ficha técnica in the form an architect's model wants. If you need a hardware item represented inside a BIM model today, we can give you the dimensioned drawing and the specification and your modeller can build the object from them, and that is the truthful answer rather than a promise with a date attached. The same goes for native CAD: we publish drawings as SVG, which any CAD package will import and which is dimensionally exact, but we do not maintain a DWG library per model.

Two practical notes for anyone assembling a submittal. First, ask for documents by model number in the configuration you are buying — finish and function suffix included — because a drawing of the 60mm backset version is not a drawing of the 45mm one. Second, tell us what the document is for. A cutsheet for a client approval, a drawing for a door manufacturer's machining setup and a specification for a tender each need a different thing emphasised, and we would rather send the right one than the largest one.