Working on a recent set of construction details in AutoCAD, I hit a snag that nearly derailed the whole process: hatching. According to the brief, I had to use BS standard hatches, seemed simple enough. But what should have been a straightforward task turned into a frustrating mystery.

The gravel hatch in particular was giving me grief. Instead of appearing as the typical spherical pattern you’d expect, it came out looking spiky and completely off. No matter how many times I tried to apply it, or how carefully I adjusted the settings, it wouldn’t generate correctly. The only workaround seemed to be copying the hatch from another drawing which was far from ideal.

After a fair bit of trial and error (and a lot of Ctrl+Z), I finally got to the root of the issue: geolocation.

Turns out, the original drawing had geolocation enabled, which was interfering with the way hatches were being rendered. Once I started a fresh drawing without any geolocation data, the hatch patterns worked exactly as expected, clean, correct, and hopefully BS standards.

Lesson learned: when producing construction details, especially those requiring standard hatch patterns, always check if the drawing file includes geolocation. It can save a lot of time and confusion.

Sometimes, it’s not the hatch settings or the block definitions at fault, it’s the invisible metadata behind the scenes. Or its just AutoCAD having a funny 5 mins!