Vintage work crew photos

[wizard69]

Hmmm. Crime Scene drawings. You a planner or investigator? lol.

I agree on mechanical pencils. Sort of costly, nice ones are worth it.
Graded wood pencils still have a good feel for drafting, but not so hot in general away from the board. To me, proper sharpeners have disappeared.
Mechanical pencils 1.1 Ø [lead holders] need a couple small items to function but are superior otherwise. Have a pretzel bucket full of spare lead, all grades, insuring I'll live to 130.
Clutch pencils [0.05 and 0.07 Ø] are convenient writing wise, and giving or losing one no big deal. 10 for $1.50. I'd like them more with colored lead easier to find. Time comes I want to mark drawing features red or green. So here I use ink most of all.
Drafting has really gone down hill, CAD users have no clue how line weight enhances readability. Big deal, the program reads it accurately. Programs don't crank handles. So colored ink stands in, when a lot of leader lines intersect without a break, to match coordinates.

Boy did you hit upon one important issue, the state of CAD drawing. I think part of this is due to the loss of drafting as a profession, a lot of companies require their engineers to generate all drawings from details on up. Of course none of these engineers have had extensive training in generating engineering drawings, nor do they have the time to care. Also there is an an assumption that high quality color is available every where and further they assume a drawing will never be ran through a photo copier. I've seen electrical drawings that really suffered from poor drawing practices and then people wonder why the machine doesn't work right.

[PJs]

Boy did you hit upon one important issue, the state of CAD drawing. I think part of this is due to the loss of drafting as a profession, a lot of companies require their engineers to generate all drawings from details on up. Of course none of these engineers have had extensive training in generating engineering drawings, nor do they have the time to care. Also there is an an assumption that high quality color is available every where and further they assume a drawing will never be ran through a photo copier. I've seen electrical drawings that really suffered from poor drawing practices and then people wonder why the machine doesn't work right.

Wizard69: Given that I grew up years ago and the high school I attended still offered mechanical drawing classes. There is certainly a reward from taking a pencil to paper that you can't get from CAD drawings. While the company has gone completely digital with tool design I still like having the ability to quickly and sometimes crudely sketch out ideas.

Toolmaker51: Drafting has really gone down hill, CAD users have no clue how line weight enhances readability. Big deal, the program reads it accurately. Programs don't crank handles. So colored ink stands in, when a lot of leader lines intersect without a break, to match coordinates.

All good points about drafting whether CAD or board drafting...Engineering standards Are and Have been (ASME Y14/ANSI Y14) since 1973 IIRC and updated regularly. CAD has been added as well as Geometric tolerancing and many others modules since. I don't agree that Engineering curriculum's don't teach it anymore but somewhat agree that they don't necessarily have time to do the true standard practices and that is a management issue.

CAD has added a lot to engineering since it's inception in 83' by Autodesk and was based on ASME/ANSI standards within the program itself...but it's main feature was it was vector based allowing for accuracy beyond any scale and pencil at 16 decimal places. Secondarily the ease of editing made it just a matter of drawing a few lines then edit, edit, edit to create any shape or objects. It's early versions went through some issues with line weights and particularly leader lines and extension lines not being properly placed but it's much better now and even allows for European standards. Another excellent use of modern CAD is proto-development and interference testing Prior to release...and the all powerful OZ of Parametric modeling.

The problems arise with printing or plotting to those resolutions and forget about copy machines as they print/scale unevenly in X & Y. Vectors to Pixels with electro/mechanical's thrown is an interpolation at best. As for color prints, I see no need and think it is sometimes a hindrance except for possibly electrical drawings (part of the IEC/IEEE standards), assembly drawings, or ISO's/3D renderings. Line weights should Only be used to make a point (per Standards). Prints should only be worked from and not used as templates, ever. With CAD and Cam we have the opportunity to transfer file/vector data directly and now with 3D printing - directly to manufacture. Pretty darn cool to me.

The real issue is that most companies start on napkin or tablet/pencil sketches, may move to board drafting, but today directly to CAD. They hire newbee Engineers/drafters/cad people (Cheap) run them hard and put them away wet, having little regard for document control within the company, at least in the early years...if they live through them. Truth is, my experience with Good machinist's/fabricators I've worked with, is a napkin sketch and a 20min conversation will almost always return a perfect part and sometimes better than I wanted, unless it's very complex or multiple specific tolerances.

My particular pet peeve is with companies supplying CAD drawings for their products...even McMaster has a good library, but typically the drawings themselves are a mess with mismatched dimensions to the actual line dimensions and a lot of times what I call dirty lines (when I was teaching ACAD), that is multiple lines over the top of one another and not joined at the ends or corners...drives me nuttier than I already am. I could have drawn the component faster than cleaning up their mess sometimes. So much for Libraries. ACAD has really worked on this and 360 is pretty impressive library wise. Solid Works also but my experience is limited with it. I've built thousands over the years as accurately (4 decimal) as I can...it's One more great value that CAD adds to the engineer/designers tool box...as long as they are to Standards!

Guess I spewed again, eh?

PJ