Tender Drawings, preparation Time Frame advice for Archi Technicians

4 or 5 weeks to way too long. that is crazy if it is just a fairly routine run of the mill one off house.

Well, see if you are starting off from scratch and have to make up families and everything and title blocks and sheet layouts, then yes, it might take you that long. But people will generally have a library of all that stuff build up that they can just drag and drop into their project.

Also, I agree performance spec is an option so you can avoid detailing everything out to the last screw You can, but even if you do, the contractor will just come back with a load of proposals for alternatives.. Performance spec is fine then you have to be sure that the engineer is actually going to be hands on and check that the components proposed by the contractor actually satsifies the spec, rather than just blindly accepting whatever muck the contractor decides to throw at it. It happens. A lot. Contractors will often knowingly chance throwing in sub-spec items if they think they might get away with it. If pulled up on it they feign ignorance or oversight. It is anything but - they are cute hurrs and know exactly what they are doing. Another common tactic is to bamboozle the engineer by delaying and then proposing a whole raft of stuff very late in the game with the pressure on. Their hope is that the engineer will not have the time or will to go through every little thing, and approve stuff that isn't quite up to spec. In my experience, it is largely all cloaks and daggers game.

Another risk of performance specification is that you could, in some cases, be leaving decisions on components and their layout and installation up to the contractor. In some cases that could be considered as giving them some limited design role. Grand, but the problem is - is the contractor actually competent to do those bits of design?
I mean all well and good while everything runs smoothly, but when something goes wrong or there is an accident and injury, it'll be picked apart. Did the engineer, by using a performance spec, knowingly devolve an element of design & specification onto the contractor, knowing that a house building works contractor would be unlikely to be competent to undertake such design? The engineer needs to be able to answer yes to that question. If not, they better get used to the idea of early retirement.

yeah if it is limited to components like that then it is manageable.

However, I have in my time seen construction stage drawings that were previously run of the mill planning drawings with note added saying "all works to comply with current building regulations" and that was the extent of the specification.

Hmm. we know the type of drawings all too well. Complete with north point facing the wrong direction, or perhaps two conflicting norths, and irrelevant stuff copy and pasted from previous jobs. Perhaps even the wrong client or project name down for good measure.

Tender drawings are pretty near enough to the construction drawings. They have to be. They have to be detailed enough to allow the tenderers to price the work accurately. But they may have some items not fully detailed out, like rebar, levels and setting out information. Other things might be detailed up in a preliminary form and subject to adjustments and minor refinement.

All being ideal, tender drawings could be used as construction drawings. However, there are always adjustments and updates between tender and construction in reality. It all depends on the scale and complexity of the job, and how much attention to detail has been given at tender drawing stage.