Art & Inspiration Drafting and Design - The work and tools

Good to hear that you were able to make the 'mental' shift from paper to computer, for me, not so much. I fell behind at about release 9...just never got the hang of it. I still have my Hamilton board and Mutoh 'L' and use it regularly. Not long ago I was looking for an old drawing and found some from my Pulp & Paper days...I thought, wow, those sure have more character than any of the current cad type drawings.

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chromeazone: Concerning "lofting". We designed tooling, so we only used french curves (if needed) for drawing any sweeping lines of the part itself...shown in position in the tool. Tooling in black, and the part in red.

"Ducks" and "lofting" are new terms for me.

Our big weights were mostly needed just to hold down a whole stack of bueprints flat on the reference board behind us. There were also other ways to control/secure/keep them, depending on what you were doing. Our really big triangles were handy for holding down the ends. Another trick was to simply let the corners curl in to form a point at the end, which would temporarily keep it from rolling up. Or maybe just throw one end of it right off the end of the board and let it fall on the floor...lol. Very often, it was more handy to just leave them rolled up...either laying on your reference board or standing up in a rack. And when you wanted to see a particular view, you'd just roll it back and forth to get to the view you needed.

The actual drawings being generated were supposedly always secured to the board with tape or staples. Or if you "thought" you were good, you could leave it loose, and periodically just check the alignment between the slideable straight edge and a horizontal reference line on the drawing. But you were taking a chance on getting things crooked if the drawing slipped and you didn't notice it. Boss: "Why are these tubes 3* out of alignment to the others?!?" Oops...time to get out the gas-powered rotary erasor. Vroom vroom. WHAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!! Oh...and your brush and dust-pan to clean up the pile of erasor shavings. Lol.

 

amazing thread guys

I trained before CAD, designed powerboats, cars,military stuff, consumer products just about everything.

I now teach Industrial Design, and it all still starts with pen and paper.

We no longer teach draughting, but all 3d sketching is geometry driven and driven by orthographic views.

Scott Roberton is a great sketching guy, and we teach them in his style



if you sketch with this level of geometry in mind then modelling and CAD are easier

 

Speaking of the bosses...some of those guys were really gooOOOOood. I had a boss walk by my board one time, and without even slowing down said, "You've got a problem somewhere in that area there."...as he made a circling/pointing motion toward one view on my layout. Took me a minute or two of looking. "Well I'll be damned. No shit." Well...here we go again. Vroooom vroooom...

 

When I was a jobber in the Sheet Metal Cab Group at White Motors in the late 70's we had Full Scale Sweeps of the cab sections made of aluminum or stainless steel (can't remember which) for "lofting". The assembly drawing masters were enameled sheet metal that could be run thru (eng spelling of through) an ammonia blueprinting machine to make prints.

That was the best Design/Draftsmen job I had in my career.

 

FYI: Wikipedia has good explanation of lofting and theory of techniques. DUCKS are shown holding curve.

 

Ducks in use here too.

Ford Motor bomber factory, Willow Run, Michigan, by Albert Kahn Associates, view of the drafting room, 1942. Photograph by Hedrich-Blessing. CCA Collection PH2000:0393. Gift of Federico Bucci. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Gift of Federico Bucci. © Chicago History Museum, HB-07074-G.​

 

I use my large 1950's drafting table all the time. After I get my designs somewhat refined, I change to computers to complete the drawings to a precise scale. I've posted some of my drawings on my build thread.

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=777555&highlight=coe&page=7 (post 132 shows my hinge design for my cab over)

 

A pic's worth a thousand words. I can see how the "ducks" work for "lofting". Thanks.

Now that's layin' down on the job.

 

OK. Here is my drafting table with Bruning given to me by my old boss. He is in his 80s and still going strong. Went to civil engineering school on the GI bill after he served in WW2.



Also you can see my Ramsey & Sleeper Architectural Graphic Standards 5th Edition.

Here is my great-grandfathers compass set. He was an ME and worked as an Industrial Designer in Connecticut. Subbed alot of stuff out to Stanley Toolworks.



And here is a sneak peak at a mothballed project I work on as time allows. It is in Acadd but is a copy of a blue print. I plan on running some copies through my old bosses Blue-Ray blueprint machine someday.



Speaking of- my Dad and Grandfather both worked for the Blue-Ray corporation in Essex Conn.

 

I still have a drafting table, T squares, Rapidiographs, tri scales, etc. from drafting classes at Texas Tech in the late 60's.

I worked at a job doing landscape design and drafting work for a couple of years after I graduated. Then I decided there wasn't anyway I was gonna spend the rest of my life in a 10 X 10 office. Blew it all off and started doing mechanic work again.

I still use the antique table and tools when I'm working on something that I can't quite get laid out in my head. And I tell my grandkids I'm drawing paper dolls when I lay out a pattern for a part I need to make.

 

HJmaniac and All: Such great pictures! We all love the old pics of rods, but love a peek into the pasts of HAMBERS also. We weren't working on our cars ALL THE TIME, right?
What's next? K&E Slide Rule Class? Fah-ged-a-bow-dit !
Now that would be a headache!

 

...at least they don't require batteries...

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Boo-ya!!=

 

I started in HS with working on vellums and making copies with that ammonia based ozalid printing. I still have my portfolio somewhere, pretty crude by today's standards.

Onto college, more pencil-paper drafting. Around 1985 I was exposed to Computervision CAD drafting. It was crashed more than it was up and running.

Later we went to the old blue-screen Auto Cad, again cumbersome and crude with only text commands. Then I was turned onto a Windows 3.1 version, icon based and it was way faster and easier. I later got into Pro-E type drafting packages in later classes.

At work we had a great Applicon (now Unigraphics Solutions) Bravo CAD/CAM package that tied in modeling, drafting and CNC programming. That was un-supported in time and when my PC crashed, it went away as IT wouldn't load it again. So we lost thousands of tool and geometry files.

I had to teach myself Auto Cad v 2004 from scratch, no manual, nothin'. It took a while to be fast with it. I mainly use the 2D module to do tool drawings and other work. I took an advanced 3D class a couple of years ago at a local college. Even that helped my 2D work.

Bob

 

I went through the full VICA drafting thing in high school. My teacher was an old school architect and a good enough teacher that when he realized I had a knack for it he just kept pushing me farther. Senior year he had me learning AutoCad r8. I won a stack of older drafting manuals and a wonderful set of pens at the big VICA competition.
Went to college for industrial design so lots more manual work and learned some of the then state of the art computer tools.
My lettering always sucked. I never could get to where I could do much lettering without getting hand cramps.

Now I draw using 100+ year old tech on one of the oldest forms of canvas, lol.

 

Started in HS 1959 and 3 yrs Tech school in tool and die design. Worked many years at the end of a lead holder trying to maintain a consistant line width. I missed the intro to cad as I bought a foundry and spent the next 25 yrs doing all the pattern drawings off a table. Then a tornado distroyed my shop and I decided to take the money go back to work for someone else only to find that Autocad and Gibbs had taken over the machine shop trade and was forced to learn Autocad. Got to say I still enjoy making a drawing but when I'm in the shop its a Autocad 2000 program in my old lap top. Its pretty hard to beat the dimension button to determine the next move on a manual mill or lathe.

 

I was a jig/fixture designer in the early 70's and went on to design large production machinery, all on a board. Never got very good with CAD and could usually accomplish what I needed to do on paper. I still use a board and paper when coming up with brackets, mounts, etc. I have never been able to just start building something without a decent drawing, once on paper the parts just seem to come alive for me.

 

I had 1 semester of drafting in high school, (1970) taught by a "teacher" that had no ability to control his classroom. (ended up being more like romper room) I did manage to pick up enough knowledge so I could read drawings and that helped me in the real world after high school. As a machinist, I was always close to the drafters and later CAD operators, but never got my hands on the system. I am a total hack, but nowadays, (retired) I draw my projects on a homemade board with the few tools I've acquired over the years. It gives me a chance to develop the ideas I come up with and acts as a launch pad to start a project from. I don't do much detail, but just enough to sort out the details I have in my head.

 

In the late '90s/early '00s the drafting program in my high school was still hand drawing based, with a semester of antiquated (even by then) AutoCAD drawing.

Post college, I spent 8 years as a CAD Engineer to bridge the gap between the traditional drafter/designer and Engineer. 100% CAD based work, no hand drawings. I grabbed most of the old drafting equipment that was still left in the desks when my engineering group moved office buildings for "old times sake" instead of letting it get chucked in the trash; lead holders, lead pointers, electric erasers, lettering guides, squares, etc.

I think having the background with drafting on paper with a pencil really helps one to consider how the views, dimensions, and notations should be laid out to properly (and optimally) represent whatever is being drawn. I could tell a definite different in drawing style/quality between the older pre-CAD guys and the post-CAD guys.

Your sections are too even and consistant for it to be an Ardun head.

 

If I'm doing something at home, I'll draw it up quick on paper, I still have my mini T-square drawing board. Or sketch it to a point, take it into work and do a real drawing.

CAD drafting makes it easy to make changes, which at work, time is everything. I haven't done a hand drawing at work for anything since 1992.

Bob

 

I really like this thread, I really like seeing the different points of view between old school hand drafting and new CAD drawing. I do AutoCAD and SolidWorks for a living and admire the old ways of drafting but would never go back to the old ways. yes the old ways are works of art but what once took weeks to draw now takes days. I love the way you can design in 3-D and then produce drawings that are 99 percent accurate along with using the model to produce cnc files for plasma cutting or laser. I love the ideals of old ways of drafting but in truth technology is great and will make our hobby safer and easier.

 

I started and learned on the board in HS in '90 my freshman year. I spent 1 1/2 years on it and then got to go to release 10 AutoCad. I had no reason to go back to the board after that, like most, my lettering was bad and I hated it. My instructor was a stickler for good lettering, so it almost made me pick other classes to take, but he showed us AutoCad and held it out like a carrot on a stick to me, so I stuck with it.
I appreciate the fundamentals that I learned that way, like the things mentioned here, the line weights etc all mean something. After HS I ended up in a mfg tech program and got to uprade to version 12, then 14. I learned the difference very quickly in a good drawing since I was in the machine shop and welding shop learning that as well. I then transferred to a 4 year manufacturing program and worked in a machine shop while in school. We did alot of work for a large company that had a room full of drafters, it reinforced my perception of good useable drawings to convey info to people. I then got a job in a wood shop running a cnc router and programming it.

I now have my own cnc router shop and I still use AutoCad to do a bulk of my work because I am very fast with it after 20 years using it. I learned the 3D side of things by using MasterCam, I had to to get the job done, cutting 3D patterns and mold surfaces and other things. At my last job I was on campus at the local university and I got to teach a few classes in cnc and I ended up spending alot of the class time reteaching the students how to draw so that you can actually use the drawing to make a part or assembly. It is not enough to know how to drive the program, you have to be able to use what you produce. Then we learned how to program and run the machines.
My old office neighbor is younger than I am but has a passion for drafting and he makes the students do lettering exercises every day and teaches the fundamentals of drafting without the boards since the school got rid of them before he came on board, but he knows the importance of learning them.

The biggest problem is that with the advances of the technology that is supposed to be learned at school you have to give up something else since there is only so many hours students are willing to take. The department I worked in there at the school has a 5 axis cnc router and other cnc machines, so if the kids are supposed to be getting to that, they have to eliminate some of the older stuff that isn't used much if at all anymore.

Again, I am glad of my experience with the board, but I don't have one and don't want one. I can sketch and make my ideas known well without it, but most of my days are spent in the computer prepping for something to be ran through the cnc machine.

 

Here is a drawing I did earlier this year from a 3D program called Tekla. This is a rebar shop drawing for a wall at Lucile Packard Childrens Hospital at Stanford.

I started drafting with pencil and paper in 2002, switched to cad in 2005 and now use Tekla. Never went to college...crap never finished high school either. Took my GED and joined the iron workers union and went from the field to the office.

 

I thought I would share the model of my hot rod, this is my 3-d model and shows how you can use it for figuring out geometry.

 

This is pretty true, at least at some schools.

I started in high school - took two drafting classes, one which was 100% by hand, the second was 50/50 hand/AutoCAD. Then my first year of college I had a few more, both hand and CAD, including a course on Descriptive Geometry that was a blast.

After that I went into electrical engineering and in my last year took an introductory CAD class geared towards incoming mechanical engineers (wasn't required for EEs, which was bad enough!). It used Pro/E, which has to be the worst CAD package out there for 3D stuff. However, I wanted some exposure to it since all I'd used prior to that was AutoCAD.

It was awful....zero hand drawing, all on computers. I was amazed how quickly they glossed over the basics, especially with proper dimensioning styles. Many never grasped the basics and struggled from day one. I felt sorry for them and would answer their questions, and was still the first one to complete my drawing and leave, every single day. Now I have to deal with their crummy drawings at work!

I think they should always, always start off with hand drafting to understand the basics. It really drills it into your head better than staring at crap on a screen.

 

I took all the drafting classes I could in high school. Then more in college. I started as a draftsman in 1978. Mostly ink on mylar. I can remember working on a project for a solid week only to have the supervisor look over my shoulder and change his mind completely. I'd have to start all over....but it paid fairly well. On to autocad in 1988, I think it was release 2.5 or something like that. Now I'm 55 years old and we are moving on to G.I.S. systems. But I still like black and white. I don't want to make the change but I know I have to. Just glad I still have a good job to go to everyday. Pays for the hot rod habit. Gary

 

I teach drafting and CAD to middle school students. Just thought I would throw in my two cents for Hambers ona budget. I use RhinoCAD at school. They have a demo version on their website. It is a full working version but you can only save 25 times. You can draw and print indefinitely though. The cost to own it is 195 for student price. It is a full 2D and 3D CAD program and very similar to AutoCAD. Although I haven't used it lately they had free tech support also. Not affiliated in any way with the company, just a tech teacher that stretches a shrinking budget.

 

BTT with this


in 2010 i returned to school for CNC and have had a lot of good industry experience so far in becoming a CNC setup machinist and eventually i landed the job i have now as a toolmaker. i use GibbsCam to create programming for the jobs that i set up and run
this is "2 1/2 D" work and 3D over solid surfaces as well

there is one very important thing that i have found since i have been doing this, and that those both teaching and learning CAD work should be mindful of.

many CAD models that engineers or draftsmen create are not useable in "as-is" form in the realm of manufacturing. Gibbs or other CAM programs cant create toolpaths over solid surfaces that have "cracks" (flaws of incomplete surface geometry), or 2d geometry that may not be properly connected

often times, tolerancing, radii, and hole sizing called out does not reflect realistic drill-chart sizing ,reamer or endmill selection, so we must interpret accordingly; or create unique toolpaths to create the feature

....so we usually create our own solids if needed. and draw our own geometry from the print as Gibbs wont let you create imperfect solid geometry.

here is an example of something i'm tinkering with at home with my own version of GibbsCam (2012+ version). this is a weldment for early-Ford style front axle king-pin bosses being deep profile-milled from solid 1018 steel (first operations), and the solid model and 2d geometry used to create the programming

once profiled on this side, the part will be flipped over in workholding, picked up for location and a "mirror image" program will be run on that side to remove that material.

a king pin hole will be bored in another workholding scenario, and the shank will be stepped down in diameter in yet another workholding scenario in order to insert into 2-inch .240-wall DOM tubing.

 

DraftSight is a very good free 2D program, produced by Dassault. I use it at home quite a bit.