Cope Detection in Structural Steel Drawings

If you work in steel fabrication, you know what a cope is. If you are an estimator pricing a job, you need to know how many copes are in the drawing set and what their dimensions are — because copes take shop time, and shop time costs money.

What Is a Cope?

A cope is a rectangular notch cut from the flange (and sometimes the web) of a steel beam so it can fit around another member at a connection point. When a beam frames into a girder, the beam's top flange would collide with the girder's top flange. The cope removes that interference.

On drawings, copes appear as:

• A rectangular cutout at the beam end with dimensioned depth and length
• Text callouts like "3X6 COPE TF" (3" deep by 6" long, top flange)
• "COPE TOP FLG", "COPE T/B" (cope both flanges)
• A small radius at the cope corner (to prevent stress cracking)

Why Copes Matter for Estimating

Every cope requires:

• CNC programming or manual layout
• Cutting time — plasma, oxy-fuel, or saw depending on the shop
• Fitting time — verifying the cope clears the connecting member
• Optional grinding for tight-fit connections

A job with 200 copes versus 50 copes has a meaningfully different labor cost. Missing copes in your estimate means underpricing the job.

How SteelFlo Detects Copes

SteelFlo's connection detection pipeline reads cope information two ways:

Text detection scans for cope callouts in the extracted text:

• Dimension-first: "3X6 COPE TF", "2X4 COPE BOTTOM"
• Keyword-first: "COPE TOP FLG", "COPE T/B"
• Abbreviations: "TF" (top flange), "BF" (bottom flange), "T/B" (both)

Vision analysis reads the drawing itself and identifies cope geometry — the rectangular notch, its position relative to the beam end, and associated dimension strings.

For each cope detected, SteelFlo records:

• Depth — how deep the cut goes (e.g., "3"")
• Length — how long the cut extends (e.g., "6"")
• Flange — top, bottom, or both

Copes in the BOM

Cope data is attached to the connection it belongs to, which is linked to the parent member. On the Review page, you see:

W12X26 — Left end 4x 3/4" A325 | 3"x6" cope | 3/8" shear tab

Everything at a glance. Confirm or reject with one click. Copes that pass review flow into your hardware summary on the Export page.

Handling Variations

Steel drawings are not standardized in how they call out copes. SteelFlo handles the common formats:

• 3X6 COPE TF — depth x length, top flange
• COPE 3" X 6" — with inch marks
• COPE TOP FLG 3 x 6 — keyword first
• COPE T/B — both flanges, dimensions elsewhere on the detail

If the drawing uses an unusual format the text scan does not catch, the vision AI still reads the geometry. Between the two, most cope details get captured.

One Less Thing to Count

Copes are easy to miss in a manual takeoff. They are small notations on dense shop drawing pages, often at the very end of the beam where the detail gets cluttered. Automated detection means they get counted every time.

Upload a shop drawing and see your copes detected automatically.