With pen on ink on mylar in a blue print machine, you’re going to get blue line on a white background.
Done thousands of them.
If instead it’s not mylar with a pen, but a surface where the draftsman scrapes the covering of the surface to create a clear line, the background is blue, but the line is white.
Not sure what that was called, where you scrape an opaque surface to allow light to get through in the blue line machine. It’s basically a negative. The only time I saw this was with a draftsman work on a light table. I never did it. I did a ton of pen/ink on mylar though and bluelines though. 4 ought Rapidigraph pens where my life (and always a great frustration). We sent out hundreds of copies or blue lines a month.
In grad school, NCSA, I recall long nights of drafting (I had to back to hand drawing there) with 4 different pencils in my hat. I’m a keep your pencil tucked into your hat guy. So there was the soft one for the borders, the harder one for edges-the trusty Tombow F, the even harder one for hidden lines, then the blue one for guides. The blue didn’t get seen by the blue line machine. I got good at knowing which pencil was where behind my ear.
Oh yeah, the electric eraser. I found it recently doing a house cleaning. The eraser sticks were kinda hard some 25 years later.
I do still have a drawing board and a drafting machine, one of those elbow hold a pair of rulers things. The plastic has degraded and cracked.
Why you should not urinate in Amazon rivers.
The Candiru fish can swim up your urinary tract and lodge itself tight.
So extremely dangerous.
Applicable to both men and women.
I had this vision of a small, dangerous spiky fish swimming upstream of a guy peeing down into the river…I guess the real idea involves urinating while swimming in the Amazon??
For some reason (and being an Astronomy nut) I had assumed that the big star in the lower left was Alpha Centauri (or possibly Beta Centauri). It is actually the “Commonwealth Star” also known as the Federation Star, who’s seven points represent the six States and current/future territories.
When I started in mechanical engineering in ~2002, they weren’t teaching much of either one. I had a single sort-of drafting course; the instructor spent a few weeks getting us to learn some basic hand-drafting techniques, and everything after that was 3D modeling. Not CAD, mind you – this instructor’s emphasis was on creating a visually appealing model, with usable 2D drawings being a lesser part of the course. I ended up taking a few AutoCAD classes on my own, and picked up enough SolidWorks to be comfortable with it and, later on, Inventor.
My workplace still has two drafting tables, one of which is still fully equipped with a variety of pencils, erasers, brushes, and stencils. We have quite a collection of drawings that have been scanned as PDF but never digitized into an editable format; if one of these drawings only needs a minor revision, it’s done by hand. I’ve gotten to do a few of these; I always practice my lettering in a quiet place before I sit down at the big table.
At one of my colleges, the electronics department requested CAD in 1980 – and the mechanical department refused. They were still making the students learn pencil drafting in 1990. I moved on and dunno what happened after that.
We made copies because we wanted to keep the original.
But perhaps you made copies because the builders were used to seeing ‘blue prints’. The original copy technology reproduced film as blue prints (originally, the lines were yellow, not white). “Blueprints” were such a common way of making copies that Discourse still accepts the term as a single word.
Because of the recent death of Don Everly, I looked over information about them on the internet. Their record Cathy’s Clown isn’t as well-remembered, I think, as some of their other work, but it’s an earworm for me, because it was one of the first records my sister bought, and she played it over and over and over and over.*
It came out in 1960 and was very influential. the Beatles apparently loved it, talked about calling themselves “The Foreverly Brothers”, and the song inspired the arrangement of Please Please Me (at least according to Wikipedia).
What I learned that was very interesting is that – says Wikipedia again – it was “inspired by Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite”. That seems a relatively obscure reference. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the whiole suite, so I’m not sure which part inspired the song. It’s one of those pieces frequently excerpted in scores for TV shows and movies, and you’ve probably heard bits from it. How would this piece have come to their attention? It turns out that Walt Disney released a Fantasia-like short, The Grand Canyon, which featured their nature photography as visual background for the piece. It’s on some Disney DVDs, and if you look you can find it on YouTube (they apparently haven’t gotten around to closing down all the sites with it).
Disney release it in 1958, and it won an Academy Award the next year for Best Short Subject. Right before Cathy’s Clown.
*The record and its slipcover both carried the Warner Brothers “shield” logo. For a long time, little kid that I was, I tried to figure out how this record related to Bugs Bunny.
I posted something similar a few years ago on a motoring forum. Several people disputed it.
I also worked out that in an engine running at 5000 rpm, each piston has to accelerate from zero to ? and back to zero x times a second. I forget the figures - perhaps someone can work it out for me.
I can’t draw but I learned to rotate my pencil while doing crossword puzzles, so that the point stayed sharper longer and didn’t produce fuzzy letters. And I didn’t have to get up to sharpen the pencil, which I’m too lazy to do until I have to.
As well, it produces a uniform lead surface that gives you the same width line continually, rather than one that gets wider as you drag the pencil/lead holder along and make that flat spot.
Never took drafting classes, but worked with a few old-school draftsmen when I started my career in steel detailing, and learned a fair bit from them.
This big old star is the only difference I can remember* between the Aus and the NZ flags - problem is, I could never remember which of the flags it was on.
Problem no more! - seven points, six states, has to be Australia - thank you very much!
j
* - yeah, I know there are other differences - but this is the only one I can remember.