You already paid for the shop drawings. You paid for them when you did the takeoff. You just paid a second time to have someone draw them.
That's the racket, and nobody calls it that because it's always been this way. You bid the job off the prints. You win it. Then you send the same prints to a drafting service — or burn a week of your own detailer's time — to produce the coursed set your crew and your supplier need. Two documents. Same wall. Paid for twice.
What you're paying now
Search "masonry shop drawings" and look at what comes back: drafting services. Per-sheet fees. Per-project quotes. Freelancers by the hour. A set for a mid-size CMU job runs real money — and that's before the first revision.
And there's always a revision. The structural drawings change, an opening moves, the architect issues an addendum. Now your set is wrong. Back to the draftsman, back in the queue, back out the checkbook. The wall moved and the paper didn't, and you're paying for the gap.
Add the part nobody invoices: the wait. Your set is in someone else's backlog while your foreman needs it Monday.
Why it costs anything at all
Because the takeoff and the shop drawings have always been two different documents made by two different people from the same plans.
The estimator counts the wall. The detailer draws the wall. Neither one's work talks to the other's. If the estimator counted 87 rake cuts and the detailer draws 91, somebody finds out in the field. Two sources of truth is how a wall gets laid from numbers it wasn't bid from.
The wall you priced is the wall you print
The Masonry Modeler doesn't draft shop drawings. It doesn't have to. It laid the bond — every block, every cut, every bar — when you did the takeoff. The set already exists. Printing it is one click.
Keyed elevations on coursing. Dims that land on block. Jamb callouts, U.N.O. tags, a piece count for that sheet. Generated from the same model that priced the job, so the wall gets laid from the same numbers it was bid from.
And when the addendum hits: change the wall. The sheets, the counts, and the bid all move together. No queue. No re-draft fee. No second source of truth.
See the full nine-sheet set — actual output, unretouched.
The honest caveat
If your submittal needs an engineer's stamp, you still need the engineer. TMM generates the coursed layout set — the elevations, placing sets, and piece counts your crew and your supplier actually build from. It replaces the drafting, not the engineering.
Do the math on your last three jobs
Pull the invoices. What did drafting cost you on the last three jobs — in dollars, in days waited, in revision rounds?
A TMM seat is $300 a month, every project included, drawings included. No per-sheet fees, no per-set fees. One job's drafting bill covers the seat for months — and the takeoff came with it.
Founder pricing — first 10 companies, locked for life →Stop paying for the wall twice.
Written at Powder River Masonry, where we bid our own work with TMM every week.