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Drafting


Wilbur

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Snot sure:scratchhead: I would hope so.  I had a lot of drafting classes, and a few CAD classes.

Like anything technical I believe understanding the theory is important. The most difficult drafting class I took was Descriptive Geometry:frantics:This is basically the projecting of views albeit lines, points, or simple shapes. In CAD this takes no thinking at all. But sometimes you might need to get a true shape of a surface on a drawing which may require a few projections to get it.  It's not too bad if the shape is simple, but think of a body panel.

When I first started looking for a job in 1994, CAD was just becoming mainstream so I got in at pretty much the beginning of the craze.  Some of the first jobs I applied to would consisted of re-drawing hand drawn drawings into CAD.

I gotta say though, seeing full sized body panel drawings on vertical drafting boards was pretty cool.

The other perk of CAD is, no more lettering :D In drafting it's not called printing. Anywho, my lettering was decent, but at work I seen a lot of old drawings and the lettering was beautiful. It looked like a printed font.  Most teachers didn't mind of your lettering style, but the key is consistency ;) 

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3 minutes ago, bikeman564™ said:

Snot sure:scratchhead: I would hope so.  I had a lot of drafting classes, and a few CAD classes.

Like anything technical I believe understanding the theory is important. The most difficult drafting class I took was Descriptive Geometry:frantics:This is basically the projecting of views albeit lines, points, or simple shapes. In CAD this takes no thinking at all. But sometimes you might need to get a true shape of a surface on a drawing which may require a few projections to get it.  It's not too bad if the shape is simple, but think of a body panel.

When I first started looking for a job in 1994, CAD was just becoming mainstream so I got in at pretty much the beginning of the craze.  Some of the first jobs I applied to would consisted of re-drawing hand drawn drawings into CAD.

I gotta say though, seeing full sized body panel drawings on vertical drafting boards was pretty cool.

The other perk of CAD is, no more lettering :D In drafting it's not called printing. Anywho, my lettering was decent, but at work I seen a lot of old drawings and the lettering was beautiful. It looked like a printed font.  Most teachers didn't mind of your lettering style, but the key is consistency ;) 

I remember drafting classes in high school and again in college as well as architectural drawings in college.  They were some of my favorite classes.  By the end of my working years though everything was cad both for the laser housings and the electronics, both schematics and ckt board design.

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3 minutes ago, maddmaxx said:

I remember drafting classes in high school and again in college as well as architectural drawings in college.  They were some of my favorite classes.  By the end of my working years though everything was cad both for the laser housings and the electronics, both schematics and ckt board design.

It was my favourite as well.  My best friend and I were in drafting together in 12th grade.  I was big into drafting and he was big into cutting classes.  To keep him alive in class I submitted work for him.  I had straight A's until I got an assignment back with a big red "F" on it.  It was circled and lower on the drawing the teacher wrote in an expansion circle.  "Excellent rendering and lettering. "F" is for forgery".  He later reversed that when I agreed to stop drawing for my buddy.  

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I had 3 years of drafting and design at a technical school in high school.  Then I was on a board for about the next 10 years.  CAD was nowhere in the commercial drawing space then.  The last time I was on a board for reals was about 1980.  All was with drafting machines - I have used T-squares but never for serious stuff.  We bought a couple of old boards - One Daughter#3 uses for art and another antique wood framed board that WoKzoo uses for her art projects.

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Good question.  Drawings are still needed for building permits, etc. and are probably all CAD based now.

Coming from a very poor family and thinking I had no chance for college, in my junior and senior years of high school I took Mechanical Drawing I & 2 and expected to become a draftsman.  The teacher also wanted us to know what was involved in the things we were drawing and taught us arc welding, foundry molding, lathe operating, and other stuff that proved useful later in life at one time or another.

Early in my senior year, I found out I could work my way through college and become the chemist I wanted to be and I thought that was the end of blueprints.

But, several years ago, my sister and BiL decided to make an enclosed tool room at one end of a long carport attached to the side of their house.

A small-stuff contractor they knew would do it cheap, but my BiL would need to get to get the building permit.

So I was recruited to make the drawing of the unit that was required for the permit.

I bought a T-square, triangles, template with special shapes, etc. and drew it by hand, as I had been taught half a century earlier, wondering if my drawing was out of date.

It turned out that I had done it perfectly except that I didn't take into account the weight supported by the new walls that would be bearing down on the cement slab driveway that was under the carport.  The architect in the Inspections and Permits office told me, "Just draw an arrow to the edge of the slab and write '2 foot cement footer under slab where wall exists.'"

And we got the permit!

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We had a drafting course freshman year of college (1990-91) - we spent about half the semester with pencils and triangles, and half at a terminal (we learned "Cadkey").

I have an AutoCAD assignment up right now.  I'm always happy to be doing CAD work.

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6 minutes ago, TrentonMakes said:

We had a drafting course freshman year of college (1990-91) - we spent about half the semester with pencils and triangles, and half at a terminal (we learned "Cadkey").

I have an AutoCAD assignment up right now.  I'm always happy to be doing CAD work.

In 1992 I learned on AutoCAD, version 11 IIRC, then 12.  When we began looking at Solid modeling in 2006, we tried out Inventor which is Autodesk and Solidworks. We went w/ Solidworks, and had it since. We also bought Solidworks Simulation in 2009.

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5 minutes ago, bikeman564™ said:

In 1992 I learned on AutoCAD, version 11 IIRC, then 12.  When we began looking at Solid modeling in 2006, we tried out Inventor which is Autodesk and Solidworks. We went w/ Solidworks, and had it since. We also bought Solidworks Simulation in 2009.

I have probably told this story before, but we developed a site layout/design for our senior design project using AutoCAD v10 for DOS, on an old 8086 machine.  We'd postpone a regen as long as we could -

computer:  "ABOUT TO REGEN - PROCEED?  (Y/N)"
all of us:     "No!  No!  No!"

but once the computer stopped asking nice, and insisted, we walked over to another building to get coffee and/or a snack, while it spun.  IIRC it took around 10 minutes to regenerate that file.

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7 minutes ago, TrentonMakes said:

I have probably told this story before, but we developed a site layout/design for our senior design project using AutoCAD v10 for DOS, on an old 8086 machine.  We'd postpone a regen as long as we could -

computer:  "ABOUT TO REGEN - PROCEED?  (Y/N)"
all of us:     "No!  No!  No!"

but once the computer stopped asking nice, and insisted, we walked over to another building to get coffee and/or a snack, while it spun.  IIRC it took around 10 minutes to regenerate that file.

Yup.  Versions 11 & 12 were DOS.  In school we had a digitzer. The first Windows version was 13 IIRC.

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2 minutes ago, bikeman564™ said:

Yup.  Versions 11 & 12 were DOS.  In school we had a digitzer. The first Windows version was 13 IIRC.

I think I was still using DOS-based CAD for a couple years once I started working.  To this day, when I use CAD, I've got my right hand on the mouse, and left hand on the keyboard.  L for line, CO for copy, OF for offset... old habits die hard.

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It's still drafting.

Just using a mouse instead of a pencil.  I believe the last time I used my pencils and triangles was 1985.  Tsquares, straighedgs (with the red strings), machines.  Moved to Applicon then.  I've done that, AutoDesk, ProE, Solidworks, Mentor, Altium...

It's in my genes.  My grandfather was a surveyor.  My father was an architect, though truly an artist.  His drawings are beautiful.

My kitchen island is the old flat file my grandfather started with, repurposed (I may have told this story before)  The drawers were full of 3 generations of drawings.  I took two - dad's drawings of the house he and my mom built during their courtship - framed them and hung them on the wall by the island.   There's a few old drafting tools spread around for display.

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25 minutes ago, TrentonMakes said:

I think I was still using DOS-based CAD for a couple years once I started working.  To this day, when I use CAD, I've got my right hand on the mouse, and left hand on the keyboard.  L for line, CO for copy, OF for offset... old habits die hard.

There's another way?

I currently work 3 mice (yes, they're blind) and a keyboard.  But, learning a new PCB program, I keep mixing up the left hand commands with other programs' commands

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21 hours ago, Randomguy said:

I don't think I would allow myself to be drafted.  I would tell the government to fuck right off.

They don’t take well to that attitude. I avoided the draft but I played nice with them. Did it playing by their rules. I’m a lover not a fighter. I would not have made a good soldier. I appreciate those who served including my dad, my brother and too of my sons but I really wanted no part of it myself.

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44 minutes ago, Longjohn said:

They don’t take well to that attitude. I avoided the draft but I played nice with them. Did it playing by their rules. I’m a lover not a fighter. I would not have made a good soldier. I appreciate those who served including my dad, my brother and too of my sons but I really wanted no part of it myself.

I actually do appreciate the old dudes who fought in WW2 or trustingly enlisted with noble intentions. 

Life has taught me that the government has no noble intentions, and they are perfectly happy sending you into harm's way in order to ensure we can have a military base in a sandpit somewhere or to get marginally cheaper oil before an election.  It is no good to be a pawn of old rich white dudes who give no shits about your life as long as they can stay in power or make an extra fraction of a penny from your service.

That said, if I had had good eyesight and knees, I would have tried to become a fighter pilot or somesuch if they would have had me.  Otherwise, I am happy to have noped outta there.

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I had the good fortune to attend a high school with an excellent tech program. In grades 9 and 10, it was drafting and electric shop for one semester, machine shop and auto for the other. for grades 11 and 12, you had to pick a major. I picked machine shop which automatically meant drafting as a minor. 

I kind of sucked at drafting though.

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