Quote Originally Posted by Toolmaker51 View Post
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.