Any Old Draftsmen out there?

[Lee Schierer]

I learned drafting years ago and then self taught myself Autocad. I switched to Pentel .5 and .7 mm mechanical pencils when they became available. I love the fact that you never have to stop and sharpen the lead to get a fine line.

[Michael L. Martin]

I had ... or have a college degree in Architectural Drafting. This was before the days of CAD. After graduating, I had the choice of going on in school and working as a draftsman, or going to the field where I worked outside and earned much better pay. I sometimes regret the decision I made, but it's just one of those choices we make in our early years. Most of my drafting equipment is still around here..... somewhere.

[Christopher Charles]

Fun thread.

I did as much drafting/design as I could in middle and high school and came through in the 80s as it was all switching over to CAD. Spent a semester pursuing architecture in college and had a job doing site drawings for a commercial roofing company. Sounds more glamorous than it was, but did do the drawings for a reroof of the Smithsonian Castle and part of BWI. Switched to ecology after that semester and haven't looked back. Though would love to have a good drafting board.

Best,
Chris

[george wilson]

I never had the luxury of one of those rotary lead pointers. We used the little sandpaper pads about the size of a file card. A few years ago I found a rotary lead pointer in a flea market,so finally have one.

[Rob Luter]

I never had the luxury of one of those rotary lead pointers. We used the little sandpaper pads about the size of a file card....
.

We always used those to sharpen compass leads in a chisel form.

[lowell holmes]

I've used all of the methods described in this string.

I'm a very old dog.

[Bill McNiel]

OK, I'm old, a registered Architect and I took my first Mechanical Drawing/Drafting class in the 9th grade (1962) but a family friend gifted me a drawing board, T-Square and triangles for Christmas when I was 10 and I have never really stopped drawing. Started sharpening lead with the sandpaper pads (wiped the graphite residue on my jeans and still do). While in The School of Architecture at USC I bought my first Bruning rotary sharpener and still have one on my board and one in the shop. I use the same model lead holder, Koh-I-Noor Technigraph 6511, that I started out with. It has 4, not 3, prongs and doubles as an excellent roach clip as well.

For ink drawings I started out with pincers and progressed to RapidoGraph in college. Still have and use the same set.

Every thing I have ever designed throughout my life has drawn by hand, no CAD or Sketchup etc., Prelims freehand, production documents using a Borco covered board, Mayline parallel bar and triangles.

IMG_0746.jpg

[William Batdorf]

I was trained as a traditional draftsman at a trade school in Penna. My training provided a respectable living for many years. I subsequently went on to earn a degree in mechanical engineering from Penn State University. I still get kidded about my printing and penmanship, which was a highly regarded skill at the school I attended. Mechanical illustrations, sheet metal developments, projected sections etc. I still keep a Vemco V-track drafting machine and all of my traditional tools close at hand in my shop. I can often work out the details of a project faster manually than I can using Autocad or Solidworks, although changes and revisions are admittedly faster in CAD. Plus...I find it very satisfying. It's kinda like planing a board four-square with a finely tuned hand plane vs. using the jointer and planer.
Old school draftsmen were identifiable by their drawing style and lettering...a trait that is lost in modern CAD systems. Anyone still own a pair of "railroad" ink pens or ruby tipped ink drawing pens? Mylar? Sepia?
Another lost skill in our modern age.
Best regards,
Bill

[lowell holmes]

I have a 6" Pickett slide rule on my desk. It has not been used for years. I can still do basic operations on it. It has tangent, sine and cosine values on it.

Old slide rules, triangles, lettering quides, all remnants of a time go by. I always took pride in knowing how to use these.

[William Adams]

Yeah, it was striking when I read my favourite book from childhood to my kids --- Divers Down: Adventure Beneath Hawaiian Seas mentions borrowing an adding machine from the accounting department, using a slide rule to perform calculations, and driving around town buying samples of items so as to weigh them --- had to dig out my slide rule to show my kids since they'd never seen one. Even worse, when my daughter did a presentation on computer storage I sent in a 5.25" floppy disk --- the teacher had never seen one, and asked if she could have it.

[Tom Blank]

Speaking of before CAD, anybody else have K&E Leroy lettering set - scribe and assorted scales? Earned an Associate Degree in Industrial Illustration at Purdue in 1964. It's been about that long since I've used the Leroy set.

[Tom Stenzel]

Goodness, we're all old!

Like Bill, I have a Koh-I-Noor 6511 from the '60s. I just used it today-on a crossword puzzle! Wear has the brass showing at the tip, the knurling was damaged when it landed on a sidewalk and stepped on about 40 years ago.

I mentioned it here before but my pointer is a pill bottle with a strip of sandpaper inside. The lid keeps the dust from getting everywhere.

Like Lowell I have a Pickett slide rule, a Syncro-Scale with the black leather case complete with the belt loop.

And William, if you need one of those 5 1/4" disks READ, I might be able to help you out. Anyone need Borlands Turbo C++ ver. 3.00 on high density 5 1/4"? I have a set of the distribution disks. How about Quatro-Pro 5 for DOS? WordStar 7.0 for DOS? Novel DOS 7? All with disks, manuals, keyboard overlays when supplied and purchase receipts?

Still have about 50 IBM punch cards in my desk. They're great for notes, bookmarks. When I was still working they were great for terrorizing apprentices too. But I kept a lot of junk for that, mercury standard cells, magic-eye tubes. With physical hazing out we had to work over their minds...

We finally shut down our CDC 1700 in 2004. As far as we knew it was the last running Autocon installation anywhere. I picked up boxes of new punch cards then saving them from the recycle bin.

-Tom

[John K Jordan]

--- had to dig out my slide rule to show my kids since they'd never seen one. Even worse, when my daughter did a presentation on computer storage I sent in a 5.25" floppy disk --- the teacher had never seen one, and asked if she could have it.

That is not surprising! You want a piece of punched paper tape to go with that?

Maybe get your daughter to figure out how many of those floppy disks it would take to hold the data in a 32 gig thumb drive, a 64 gig iPad, and 1 TB of SSD like is in this laptop I'm typing on. Then calculate how long it would take to transfer that much data from the floppies. That would be educational.

I still have a few 8" floppy disks - I was the first one on my block to have a disk drive. Well, to have a computer too, homebuilt. I had to learn to program in 6800 assembler since there was no software at first. I bought a teletype for I/O and storage for my first computer - I used its paper tape punch and reader to save and load data and programs at 110 baud. That was a lot quicker than entering hex code one byte at a time. By the time the IBM computer came out my homebuilt had bubble memory, a whopping 10 meg hard disk, home made A/D and D/A converters, a real CRT terminal, a separate 512x512 b&w graphics display, and was maxed out with a massive 56k of static memory. Good fun!

I still have a small museum of computer things from the 70s and earlier, for example an 8k memory board, 5 meg disk platter. I took pictures of one of my favorite items, a memory board from a PDP-8:

core_memory_s.jpg

I read an article which described a large room full of women painstakingly threading the tiny cores onto wires. Imagine doing that all day, month after month...

JKJ

[Jim Ritter]

Yup, I have two sets of Leroy guides. One in a wooden box and a newer one in plastic case.
Jim

[lowell holmes]

Are there any old piping designers out there?