How to balloon a drawing for inspection
Ballooning a drawing means putting a numbered bubble on every dimension and tolerance so each one can be checked and signed off. If you're doing it by hand, here's the faster way.
What ballooning is, and why it's done
Ballooning is how a print becomes something you can inspect against. Every dimension, tolerance, GD&T callout and note gets a number, and that number follows the characteristic all the way through the inspection sheet and the report. It's the first thing that happens when a first article lands, and it gets done again every time the print is revised.
How it's done by hand today
By hand, someone opens the PDF, drops a bubble on each callout, and types the number beside it. Then they keep the numbering straight — the same characteristic wears the same number on the drawing, on the sheet, and on the report. On a busy print that's a couple hundred numbers to place and never lose track of.
Where it goes wrong
Usually two places. A callout gets missed — a tolerance tucked into a note, a dimension over on the second sheet — and it never reaches the inspection sheet. Or the print gets revised, a characteristic moves, and the numbering has to be redone without disturbing the ones that didn't change. Either one costs a re-check.
How PlusMinus does the pass
Upload the drawing and PlusMinus reads it — vector or scanned — and pulls out every dimension, tolerance, GD&T callout and note. It numbers each one and drops a balloon on it automatically, snapped to where the callout actually sits. Every read comes back with a confidence score, so anything it's less sure of gets flagged and sorted to the top of your review list. Everything stays editable; you confirm what's there and export when it's the way you want it.
What comes out
A ballooned vector PDF you can hand straight to your floor, an inspection form in Excel and PDF with a row for every characteristic, and a spreadsheet of your data.
What if we can't upload drawings to the cloud?
Then don't. Linked Operations can build you an on-premise install that runs inside your own network. It's a custom build rather than a download, and it carries no compliance certification of its own. Tell us what your contract actually requires and we'll tell you straight whether we can meet it.
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