The two offices next to mine at work still have drafting tables in them. One fellow uses his, and the old occupant of the other office did till retiring a month ago. Both these guys started in the '70s. For some reason the new occupant, who uses CAD, hasn’t gotten rid of it.
I’m on the advisory board for the community college in town which teaches engineering technology. They are the folks who teach the AutoCAD tecnichians - what we used to call draftsmen.
At this fall’s meeting we were told that the college just got rid of their drafting tables. They no longer teach manual drafting.
As far as the tables themselves, **Stranger on a Train **has the timeline just about right, IME. I was working in a large engineering firm during the late 80’s early 90’s. As CAD became more and more utilized, the drafting tables dwindled in number. Finally one day they were just all gone.
If I had room for one, I’d have one too. They are excellent for working with a set of plans - for example, doing mark-ups, as they are the right size and having an angled top makes drawing at the top of the sheet easier.
I still have a drafting table with Mayline parallel rule, plus a whole lot of drafting and paste-up supplies. Sometimes I need to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty.
I have a small table next to my computer at work. 90% of my work is on the computer but now and again I still need to figure out a design via hand and having a drafting table is the way to go. But I will admit it is rare that I use it as I have adjusted and find that most of the items I once used the drafting table for, I can more easily do on the computer. But often times I also find the computer too restricting and engineering like–and so will step away and do a simple freehand sketch and then move back to the computer, so it does cut both ways.
I had a light table and all the accessories for drafting for 20 years since I was 15, drafted hundreds of drawings, even went to school and trained in Autocad.
Could never find a job Drafting or Designing…they said I had no experience. :rolleyes:
All that stuff got old and dusty in storage…I finally tossed it.
On some junk collecting TV program someone paid a ridiculous amount for a drafting table and the wood was rotten.
TV’s American Chopper shows them using Cintiq tablets quite frequently. If you’ve seen the program, you know it’s a tough environment. (There seems to be a lot of wanton roughhousing in that shop.) I’m pretty sure one wouldn’t survive being sat on, but unless you draw with a hammer and chisel, they should be fine since they’re designed for on-screen drawing, brushing, etc.
Not to mention serious impulse control and anger management issues … but you are right, it is an environment hard on electronics.
I love the mechanically oriented programs, just to see how different people have their shops set up =)
machine porn …
mmm=)
We keep a few old drawing tables in the factory for the workers to spread prints out on. We have them locked at an angle so you can’t set a coffee cup on the table and spill it on the prints.
I started at an avionics company in 1985. At that time they were just transitioning to CAD. Mentor Graphics workstations linked to a mainframe. They started converting all the drawings on current projects to CAD, because it was easier to make changes. Then they converted back to Mylar prints on things that needed frequent changes, because the limited number of CAD workstations was a bottleneck, and the changes could happen faster by hand!
Back then our department of 6-8 engineers had two full time “engineering assistants” that spent about 2/3 of their time doing drafting. Then there was a whole drafting department with 20 or so drafters, a couple of (hawt) secretaries, people who spent all day making blueprints, a manager etc.
You could get full sized blue-prints within a few hours, but reductions had to be sent out of house, and took a couple days. I recall literally crawling around on the floor looking at a J-sized print.
Now some places still have CAD based drafting departments, but other places have the engineers do all the drafting. There are advantages to each approach.
The problem is that most new engineers don’t know how to make a decent detail drawing if their lives depended on it. They’re good at making the software dance, but when it comes to understanding how dimensions and tolerances are applied, or whether a part is manufacturable, they’re spectacularly unexperienced. Back in the days of hand drawings, an mechanical or civil engineer would spend his first couple of years just doing draftsman’s work and/or working on a production floor, actually having to use the drawings, and then would move into an entry-level design or supervisory position where he’d have a draftsman or designer who would produce the actual drawings which would be checked by a senior draftsperson before being checked by the engineer, who had at least a marginal understanding of what the symbols meant. Now you have mid-level engineers fumbling around trying to make drawings that are badly arranged and poorly detailed, often with critical tolerances or dimensions missing because the engineer doesn’t understand what information is actually critical to the guy (or gal) on the floor actually welding, bending, and milling real parts.
The integrated, parametric solid CAD has been a boon for analysts, who can take CAD models and perform high fidelity analysis without having to build their own geometry from the ground up. But most engineers can’t convey their designs into production detail for love or money. For all the supposed efficiency of having the engineers turn their mental concepts directly into CAD models, we’ve lost a lot by dispensing with the core of experienced draftspeople and designers who understand the fundamental skill of making a design manufacturable.
Stranger
The place I worked at in the early 1990s had three drafting tables, with all the accoutrements – mechanized erasers, sandpaper pads, pounce bags, mechanical sharpeners, etc. We only had two drafters, but all three tables were in use. Within five years the tables were gone. The timeline was later than Stranger’s, but this wasn’t a big aerospace company – it was a small firm, and the bottleneck was the cost of the big computers necessary to handle the CAD programs at the time. It was the old generation of drafters and mechanical engineers who learned how to use the new computer stations, which not only speeded up drawing production but made it more flexible and made it possible to share our stuff with other places. The transition time depended on how long it took to get our personnel up to speed, but it couldn’t have been more than a few months.
It gave us more room. But I miss the Drafting section – the space needed for those tables meant you always had an open and airy region over in that part of the building. And you needed good light for the tables. The changeover meant that that space could now be used to shove more engineers in. Worse, the drafters were now working in darkened cubicles, the better to see the images on their screens.
Good topic-reminds me of a yard sale…where the guy was trying to sell a beautiful K&E Drafting set-nice compasses, bars, etc., in a green velvet lined mahogany case-a real work of art, but useless in the CAD world-no takers!
I’ve been in a few Engineering Departments. My mental image of a generic Engineering Department is a couple desks with computers on them, a bunch of file cabinets and a drafting table. The drafting table doesn’t have a chair in front of it, a good lamp, or any actual drawing tools anywhere. Instead, like the top of the filing cabinets and any other free semi-horizontal furniture surface, it just holds piles of various questionably-current plans and blueprints. It’s optional, but unlikely, to have the table arranged so as to make a convenient place to spread out large plans; more likely it’s just a holder for piles of computer-printed paper.
My dad is an estimator for a medium-sized electrical contractor. He has a drafting table.
Gotta put the computer somewhere.
He also spreads blueprints out on it.
In ship-building, the software for defining complex hull forms and perform stability, drag and sea-keeping calculations had been developed by the yards themselves in the 60s and 70s. When I entered the industry, there were already established scripts that moved these forms to 2d-CADs like Autocad. So CAD was already present. But there were also countless drawings that had little to do with hull form, computers were expensive and qualified personnel untrained for use. The offices were large, so it was easy to make the transition really gradual and smooth.
The yard or consultant would encourage everybody to learn CAD and offer training while keeping the drawing boards for almost everydoby. Some people were seen as “computer experts” (doing a lot of IT-support on the side) while others, often older workers, doing almost everything by hand.
There was a large variation between both projects and disciplines how much work was done by computer. Many projects don’t start from scratch, forcing an early desicion which things you scan/redraw in CAD and which copy and revise manually. This kept some manual drawing alive for a long time. I think my last such project was as late as around 2000. Nowadays most as-built drawings are already in CAD and paper drawings would be scanned. (Well, actually I don’t think such a thing as “as-built” drawing exists, but that’s another rant.)
The final physical abandonment of boards was related to room and business cycles. Some offices are situated in half-empty yards in the middle of nowhere while others are really crowded. A drawing board is really a practical board for keeping large sheets of paper taht you need to look at every 5 minutes. In our golden age of lots of room for everybody, we typically had a drawing board, two large horizontal tables for drawings and a smaller table for writing stuff. So they were forced out by new workforce needing space more than anything else.
Draftsmen have traditionally needed a lot of space to keep their ref. drawing etc. Nowadays I see them using their double screens all the time, so maybe it’s finally making the boards useless, even a s a storage. If you have a large office, you can choose yourself if you fit a sofa or a drawing board there.
What did he want for it? Why didn’t you buy it?
(referencing his post, but dang, one’s response should never be shorter than what’s quoted.)
This is highly descriptive of how things work in my company, and based on companies I’ve worked at in the past, probably how the whole industry works.
We have a CAD group that does nothing but product geometry. They’re not product specialists, though, and take their direction from product engineers who have design responsibility. The product engineers get a lot of feedback from marketing, but they’re not orders, just wants (usually). The product engineers also get a lot of feedback from manufacturing (that’s me). Some of the product engineers have manufacturing backgrounds, but not all, meaning that, as Stranger implies, we get some interesting concepts. Of course my particular part of the product is part of a vast system, so there are other areas of concentration that feed back their manufacturing and integration concerns to the product engineers. Finally, the product engineer has the CAD group make the required changes to a new revision level, and everyone goes through their whole manufacturing feasibility process again. The CAD data is unified, and is used for tool building/integration, safety, crash CAE, durability CAE, virtual assembly, and so on and so forth. However the 3D CAD isn’t very useful by time we reach the actual manufacturing stage, and so we have a different CAD group use the 3D CAD to generate lots and lots of 2D views with markup appropriate to each of the manufacturing procesess. These become static revisions as well, and have to be monitored and synced in case any of the 3D data is updated.
As complicated as my company’s products are, though, the use of CAD only serves to speed things up. It would be a nightmare to have to pass physical prints out to hundreds of people, and try to implement a version control system on them. Maybe in the old days, when products were much, much simpler.