Another way that doesn’t involve redrawing the desk is to take your scale drawing to a repographic place or Kinkos and have them scale it up. Find out what their maximum magnification factor is (200%, 300%, sometimes 400%) and be sure that they can print to a 48" wide sheet. Then calculate how many times you have to magnify it to get it to full scale.
I was trained as an engineer’s assistant in the Air Force. The first place I was posted to had one of this machines - like pretty much every place that handled blueprints a lot did, back then.
This one, was broken, though. There is a pickup unit that sticks down in the tank of ammonia. This thing has a heating unit in it, and there’s a pump to pump the stuff up from the tank to the machine itself. The pump didn’t work on this machine.
If you needed to make copies, you first turned on the machine and let the heating element in the pick up in the tank get hot. Then you’d crawl underneath and unscrew the pickup from the tank and give it a good wank. You’d jiggle the pickup up and down in the tank until eventually some of the stuff splashed up into the heater, and boiled off - which would drive enough ammonia up into the machine to develop a couple of copies.
I didn’t mind the smell so much, but jokes about “going off to have a wank” with a couple of blueprints got old real fast.
The next place had a better machine, but the ammonia was more concentrated - if you got a sniff of it, it felt like your nose was on fire. You definitely didn’t want to inhale the fumes. Refilling the tank sucked, until I found out that the training filters on a gas mask do a grade A job of filtering out ammonia. After that, I’d wait until the next round of excercises to fill the tank - and the tank got filled then no matter if it were only half empty.
Bad News Baboon, thanks for the link. It explains exactly what I wanted to know.
Ammonia smells foul though. It is used in refrigeration and I have been in plants where some was vented and it was just awful having to breathe the stuff.