Whether the beam clears the duct is the engineer’s stamp, not mine, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What I read is the language and the math written on the sheets — callouts, schedules, general notes, revision blocks, figured dimensions — checked against the specification, the pricing form, and the rest of the package. Where the words on a drawing disagree with the words in the spec, somebody is going to eat the difference. Every finding cited to sheet and detail.
On a Canadian construction tender, the drawings are binding documents like every other part of the package, and they are the ones least often read against the rest of it.
Callouts against pay items. A sheet calls for a material, a thickness, or a treatment that has no matching line on the pricing form — or has one that describes something else. Price it as drawn and you lose on price. Price it as scheduled and you eat a change order.
Revisions that moved one thing and not the other. A sheet gets reissued and a dimension changes, but the schedule that quoted the old figure never gets touched. The revision block records that something changed. It does not record what depended on it.
General notes against the specification. Boilerplate notes carried forward from the last project, still calling out a standard the spec superseded, still naming a submittal the spec no longer requires.
As-builts from another era. A record drawing appended to the package because it describes existing conditions, carrying a code edition that has since been replaced — and no note anywhere saying which document governs when the two disagree.
Math that doesn’t close. Figured dimensions that don’t sum to the overall. Quantities on a schedule that don’t match the same quantity stated in the notes. Arithmetic is checkable without ever interpreting the geometry, and it is wrong more often than anyone expects.
I am not an engineer and I don’t issue engineering opinions. I don’t tell you whether a section is adequate, whether a slope drains, or whether a member carries its load. When a finding depends on geometry, I say so explicitly and hand it to your engineer to verify, with the sheet and detail already cited so the verification takes minutes instead of an afternoon.
That boundary is the reason the findings are worth reading. A review that quietly mixes checkable document conflicts with unstamped engineering judgement gives you a list you have to re-verify from scratch. Everything I hand you is either something the documents say plainly, or something I have labelled as needing a stamp. Nothing in between, and nothing wearing more confidence than it earned.
Sprinkler replacement, two occupied towers. All three of these were in the same binding package:
Read it one way, you eat a change order. Read it the other, you price a pump and lose on price. The conflict is invisible to anyone reading only one document. I found it in the written content on the drawings, cross-checked against the spec and the pricing form. I didn’t interpret the geometry, and I said so where I couldn’t. Twenty-three documented gaps on that tender; eight serious enough to affect who wins.
There is a growing field of AI tools that review construction drawings, and some are genuinely good at what they do. They read the geometry: where a duct crosses a beam, where a dimension doesn’t match between two views. Real work, and real value on a building.
That is a different job from this one. I am reading the written content and the arithmetic, and I am reading it as part of a tender package — against the specification, the pricing form, the addenda, and the evaluation terms. A clash-detection pass on the drawing set alone will never see a callout that disagrees with a pay item, because the pay item isn’t in the drawing set.
Some of what those tools do would pair well with what I do — they read the geometry, I read the logic. A general contractor running both would catch what neither catches alone. Already running another process? Send me the same package and I’ll run my logic-check alongside it, free — you’ll see what each of us catches. Just another honest set of eyes.
A closed or awarded Canadian construction or heavy civil tender, drawings included. I’ll run it free and you can compare what I find against what actually came up during construction — the RFIs, the change orders, the arguments about who was supposed to price what. Don’t have one handy? Just ask — I can pull most Canadian public tenders myself. You call, I go to work.
Or email directly: kevin@tendernova.ai