You send the M-sheets. We send back a line-by-line duct takeoff — straight, fittings, gauge, seam and reinforcement — in a format your shop can actually fabricate from.
Most duct takeoffs die one of two deaths. Either nobody has time, so the bid goes out on a square-foot guess and the shop eats the difference. Or somebody spends three nights on it and still misses the transitions.
We do the takeoff so you can do the bid. Send the mechanical drawings — a PDF from the GC's bid invite is fine — and you get back a quantified duct takeoff broken out the way a sheet metal shop reads it, not the way a general-purpose estimating tool prints it.
Linear footage by size and gauge, with seam and reinforcement class called out so the shop is not guessing at TDC versus drive-and-slip.
Footage by diameter and gauge, spiral separated from longitudinal seam where the drawings distinguish them.
Elbows, transitions, offsets, tees, taps, end caps and boots — counted individually, not rolled into a percentage adder.
Dampers, access doors, turning vanes, flex connections and hangers picked up off the sheets and the specs.
Straight duct is the easy part — it is a length and a gauge. The money hides in the fittings. A radius elbow with turning vanes is not the same labor as a mitered elbow, and a shop that prices both as "one elbow" will win the wrong jobs and lose the right ones.
So the fittings get counted one at a time. That is slow, and it is exactly why it does not get done in-house at eleven o'clock at night. It is the part we are set up to absorb.
A Dropbox, Google Drive or WeTransfer link is easiest. If it is a big plan set, do not try to email it — send the link.
Your first job is $189 flat, up to six mechanical sheets. That is an introductory price for new customers, so you can test this on a job you are already bidding without committing to anything.
After that, $35 per sheet. We count the mechanical sheets that actually carry duct — not the cover sheet, not the schedules-only pages, not the details you will never take off. You know the number before we start, and it does not move because the job turned out to be harder than it looked. On a very large plan set we quote it up front instead, and you still have a firm number before anybody counts anything.
If you send us a plan set and we think the takeoff is not worth doing — scope too vague, drawings too preliminary, addenda pending that will change everything — we will tell you that instead of taking the money.
Turnaround depends on plan set size and what is already in the queue. Send it over with your bid date and you will get a straight answer on timing before any work starts.
Send the sheets and your bid date. You will get a price and an honest answer on timing before anybody starts counting.