How to Draw Cross Sections in 5minutes using AutoCAD

Most of the engineers, technical officers, and surveyors, working in civil Engineering related works need to draw Longitudinal sections and cross-sections. If you are working on Irrigation or Road construction sector this is mandatory.

Site Surveying…

Before you start drawing cross-sections, you should complete the site survey. For the survey mostly Leveling instruments are used to get levels at the site. You should mark the chainages along the path you are going to create cross-sections. The distance between two chainages can be decided according to your requirement.

Then start your survey and clearly take levels of the sections of each chainage of the road, tank bund or canal which you are going to draw cross-sections.

Rearranging the data…

Complete your survey and take all the reduced levels related to the chainages. Now you want to arrange your data. For that, you need to open an Excel sheet and rearrange your data as follows.

• The first column – offset related to chainage
• Second column – Reduced level
• Third column – Chainage

Complete your spreadsheet and ‘’save as’’ the file into.CSV format.

Start drawing in AutoCAD…

Now you are going to start drawing. Open AutoCAD. (I am using Autodesk AutoCAD 2019 and this will work for yours also.)

Go to AutoCAD startup screen and click ”File” and open New ‘’acad’’ template.

Then click ‘’Tools’’ and click ‘’Load Application’. Now browse the.LSP file ‘’X-Section’’ and Load it to AutoCAD. (or use the short command ‘’ap’’ and press Enter to open app loader.)

If appears any security massage click ‘’Always load’’. Then check whether the massage appears ‘’X-Section.lsp successfully loaded’’.

Download the.LSP file…

Download the X-Section File

Download csv file for LS

Download csv file for CS

Download 12 Impotent LSP and DCL files including this S-Section LSP here. – (Please Subscribe the channel and click the bell icon to get the notification to know how to use the other LSP and DCL s using for cross-section drawings and auto CUT and Fill calculations)

All the dimensions should be in meters

Now everything is ready to draw the CS you want.

Type the command ‘’CS’’ and press Enter to run the loaded. lsp

Set up horizontal and vertical Scales…

Now it asks horizontal scale and vertical scales. XXX/1000. If you put XXX = 1000 means 1000/1000 (1000:1000). I prefer to give 200 to both horizontal and vertical scales. (200/1000 = 1:5)

After entering both scales you need program ask the .csv file location that we prepared to draw cross-sections. You just want to give the path of the file that you prepared and press Enter. Then click on the AutoCAD work plane and wait. It will be amazed you and Cross-sections will be drawn for the relevant chainages.

See below video and if you want to watch this process clearly and if you have any doubts please contact me.