Any Old Draftsmen out there?

[lowell holmes]

I have two Fugle lead pointers on my desk. I occasionally will put a point on a drafting pencil.

Are there any others out there old draftsmen out there? Just curious. . .

[Malcolm Schweizer]

Yes. I designed my father's remodel of an old home when I was just in high school- all done on vellum and pencil. He gave me a drafting table and drafting machine for Christmas. (The kind that keeps the ruler at a given angle using pulleys as you move it across the table.) I still have that drafting machine. I was taking a drafting class. When I say "designed," I really mean I did the layout and wiring scheme and not all the structural, as it was just a remodel. My payment for the work was I got to put a 10x12 darkroom, which I also got to design from scratch. Now I am really dating myself.

Although I have embraced CAD for my surfboard and boat designs, I still prefer to draw thumbnails by hand, and furniture is done by hand.

[James Pallas]

I still have drafting table and all the tools. I don't do any drafting anymore. I still find the tools and pencils very handy for layout work. Squares, triangles. French curves are very accurate layout tools.
Jim

[george wilson]

I started teaching drafting ,woodworking,and metal working in 1963.. Taught till 1970,always including drafting.

When we bought this house,I spent 2 weeks designing the building for our(my wife's and mine) workshop,which is the same size as the house. Actually a bit larger. I still used pencil,and Caslon Vidalon drafting vellum.

[Ted Calver]

Never used a fugle. Still use the Leitz for precision points. Although I run AutoCad and SketchUp, the onionskin on my drafting table gets all the creative ideas first.

[William Adams]

Was taught a modicum of drafting in high school shop class --- still likely to sketch anything out on paper first.

[Jim Ritter]

Hand drafting for me. Been doing it since the late seventies. I tried to use CAD but just couldn't get the hang of it so it slowed me down. I see the advantages of it but I'll just carry on.
So yes several different pointers, drafting sets, and a couple of different drawing boards with the drafting arms or track on the big one.
Jim

[Derek Cohen]

A battery powered Faber Castell in bakelite on the left, which was my late father's. He was an architect. Prior to my education as a clinical psychologist, I trained in the building industry, and one area involved drafting the old way.

http://www.inthewoodshop.com/ToolReviews/Anotsohumblepencil_html_2bcef540.jpg

One the right is the lead pointer I use all the time, a Gedess ...

http://www.inthewoodshop.com/ToolReviews/Anotsohumblepencil_html_749b2af0.jpg

Regards from Perth

Derek

[John K Jordan]

I did paper, vellum, pencil, and ink until CAD. I have lots of drawing tools, boards, and drafting table and other things that probably belong in a museum with my slide rules. My favorite tools are a couple of very well crafted hardwood triangles, 45 and 30/60.

Some of my tools are quite useful now for designing and laying out patterns for chip carving.

JKJ

[Al Launier]

Myself as well. I used this one when I was a draftsman at GE on the Tool & Die Makers Apprentice program in the early1960s. Along with this I still have the mechanical pencils, drafting triangles, protractor, drafting set, and even a K&E slide rule. I'd have to take a refresher course on the K&E if I wanted to use it again. Ah, the 'ol days.

[Roger Nair]

I'll cop to old but never to being a draftsman, however I would draw and use 3d modeling software to further my timber framing work. I originally used a students drafting kit to workout detailing and basic building plans. Around 1992 I bought into FormZ beta release and began producing dot matrix drawings and I started the expense of unending upgrades. In the late 1990's with the advent of Ebay, I started down the pathway of old professional drafting tools. The star of my collection is a Bruning track drafting machine (gloat) purchased for $20. I evolved into detailing and problem solving by old school drafting, while using the computer for the overall modeling of the frame.

[lowell holmes]

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I have one of these in my office. I'll give it up when I pass on.:)

And that is not going to be for a long time. I just returned from my morning 2 mile walk.

I suspected there are alot of draftsmen in this group. I think they gravitate to wood working.

[James Tibbetts]

I still have all my drafting stuff but it's packed away. Digital now. And, like Al, still have my K&E slide rule.

[Malcolm Schweizer]

358621

I have one of these in my office. I'll give it up when I pass on.:)

And that is not going to be for a long time. I just returned from my morning 2 mile walk.

I suspected there are alot of draftsmen in this group. I think they gravitate to wood working.


That's a real beauty! When I get a shop with more room I intend to build something like that.

[Jim Koepke]

I have been employed as a drafter many years ago, back when it was commonly listed as a draughtsman.

My pencil pointers vary from the ones at the top of the Stedlar/Mars pencils to a hand held device. There is also one that sits on a table and another on the end of my electric eraser. Occasionally a piece of old sandpaper is used.

For fun a few years back I made some 30/60 triangles to use for drawing:

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The fat one works as a saw guide, doesn't get used much of late.

I also made a larger pair that is used to support my drafting board on my bench. I can't find a picture of those at present.

jtk

[Mark Gibney]

I was reading this thread and I had to look up the difference between a lead holder and a mechanical pencil - this short youtube video set me straight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L5rxYw_ISg

Now, can anyone recommend a good pencil sharpener, either electric or manual?

[lowell holmes]

[QUOTE=Mark Gibney;2682862]I was reading this thread and I had to look up the difference between a lead holder and a mechanical pencil

Now, can anyone recommend a good pencil sharpener, either electric or manual?

Check this site:

https://www.amazon.com/X-ACTO-Manual-Pencil-Sharpener-Finish/dp/B00006IEDY/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1492795230&sr=8-7&keywords=pencil+sharpeners


I have a similar one mounted on a side bench in my shop.

[Jeff Zihlman]

.... the onionskin on my drafting table gets all the creative ideas first. I used to work with a guy who like to call it "bum wad" but I never figured out if that was a wide spread term or just him...

[Jim Koepke]

[edited]
Now, can anyone recommend a good pencil sharpener, either electric or manual?

Do you want a pencil sharpener or a lead pointer?

Searching > lead pointer < on ebay brings up a lot of good choices.

jtk

[lowell holmes]

I had one of those and then went to the Fugle. The Fugle allowed me to be a "shirt pocket" designer.

A shirt pocket designer was a guy that would show up with two pencils, a 30-60 and 45 degree triangle, 6" scale (ruler), and eraser, and lead pointer.

He would changes jobs for 25 cents an hour. Those were the days:).

[Kurtis Johnson]

Occasionally a piece of old sandpaper is used.
In high school, back in the mid eighties, we used sandpaper to get a fine point, then swiped it across something to get the dust off. Don't recall what the latter was. Might have been tape. We also used a little manual handheld rotary sharpener. I at one time toyed with the idea of drafting or architecture. I went in into graphic design instead.

On that note, I was on the cutting edge of computer use as a graphic designer. Our firm in Minneapolis brought computers for graphic design production to the midwest. However, we still used drafting tables with very complex mechanical arms on pullies. They were beautiful. Amazing devices really. I miss the hand work of those days. Production and design almost solely via computer was not sexy at all. That's partly why I'm drawn to woodworking.

[andy bessette]

My lead pointer is an ancient Koh-I-Noor identical to the first photo. It clamps to my drafting table at any comfortable angle. I spent many years on the drawing board for McDonald-Douglas and Xerox Electro Optical Systems. My drafting board is somewhat similar to the second photo.

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[Jim Koepke]

My lead pointer is an ancient Koh-I-Noor identical to the first photo.

That is also one of my lead pointers, couldn't remember the name.

jtk

[andy bessette]

JK--it's amazing how long these little plastic things keep doing the job!

[Ron Bontz]

My lead pointer is an ancient Koh-I-Noor identical to the first photo. It clamps to my drafting table at any comfortable angle. I spent many years on the drawing board for McDonald-Douglas and Xerox Electro Optical Systems. My drafting board is somewhat similar to the second photo.

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358639
ooo that's a nice one. I just have my old circa Frank Loyd Wright wooden drafting table, bought from a 90 year old for $15.00. Had to shamefully cut it down to 4 ft. wide to fit it in my original shop. Learned the old fashion way in high school and a semester in college. Have learned just enough cad to get me into trouble. A lot of time, over the years spent at that table staring at a semi blank piece of vellum. I too was taught to use the sand paper for a fine tip.

[Ron Bontz]

That's a real beauty! When I get a shop with more room I intend to build something like that.

Yes that's the one I have. I added a drawer to the underneath of the table and a ( bruening ? )drafting machine. I was told it was a Frank Lolyd Wright era table. True?

[michael langman]

I learned technical drawing in high school, but when I worked in the tool and die shops, I sometimes had to pull drawings of progressive dies out of the large cabinets that held the old drawings for safe keeping.
The engineers I worked with really knew their stuff when it came to layering the many aspects of the tools in progression, and using correct datums for ease of building the tools.
Some of those prints were extremely complex, and took time to work with.
I also worked for an Engineering firm that had about 30 draftsman in the early 1970's. They were Enviromental Engineers for civil projects and boy, those guys liked to drink at lunch time. The draftsman that is.

[michael langman]

Al, That picture brings back memories. My dad worked for GE in Pennsylvania in one of their plants as a mechanical engineer. I used to sneak his mechanical pencils from his drafting table when I was very young. He had the same sharpener on his table.

[Kurtis Johnson]

Cool! That mechanical arm thingy in your second photo is very similar to what I was talking about using at the graphic design firm I worked for. Might be the very same. Ahh. Miss those days.

[Rob Luter]

Yup. I started out on the drafting board in the job shops of Detroit. I was a detailer drawing machine parts first, then graduated to designer. Then went to college. I worked on the Pontiac Fiero project in '81 drawing the machinery that welded together the underbody. Just a room full of guys with huge drafting boards cranking out a lot of paper. It was a great foundation for CAD a couple years later. After college I found that most of the Engineers coming out couldn't design squat. Rather than teaching kids to design and document, the schools were teaching them to run a CAD program. At the time, 2D CAD was just an expensive pencil.

I still have all my old gear. Several lead holders (chuck pencils) and lead pointers, templates and triangles, and a big batch of boxwood scales. I have a batch of compasses and dividers too. They all come in handy for layout work.

[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.

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[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:

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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?

[george wilson]

I also have an old Leroy lettering set ! My oldest drafting set must be very nearly 18th. C.. Even has an ivory rule with it,with several different scales engraved on it. I used it in my film when laying out the keyboard for the spinet we were making in the film. Used to could get nice old(and hardly used) old drafting sets pretty cheap in the Pennsylvania flea markets. They seem to have realized their value by now!!:)

[James White]

I just noticed that Lee Valley sells a pointer!

http://www.leevalley.com/us/wood/page.aspx?p=65253&cat=1,44047

:)
James

[Jim Koepke]

Often times a project design will be drawn on paper to decide on scale, sizes, layout and joinery. Often it is just drawn out on the wood being used for somewhat simple projects like a book shelf with a couple of drawers.

For pencil pointing here are my main four:

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One is on the end of the electric eraser. Another is the red thing standing on end. Third is the Ko-I-Noor pointer and finally the Staedtlar Mars lead holder of a particular model came with a pencil pointer on the end. It can be removed for use. Their leads when bought in the dozen packs came with colored tips that could be installed in place of the pointer as a way to know which holders had which leads.

For supporting my drafting board when needed, two triangles were made. Here is one:

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It has a 3/4" dowel to fit in a dog hole and a clamp or hold fast secures it to the bench. The dowel on the 30º end has a wood rail to fit on it for keeping pencils and stuff from falling off the board on to the floor.

My plan was to have an ogee curve at the top of the shelf. After penciling it in it seemed like it might be fun to draw the ogee with an ellipse instead of a circle:

359259

There are at least a half dozen wooden circles in my shop for layout work. This is my first ellipse. Will likely make more for other lumber sizes.

This will make a stretched ogee. Turning the ellipse 90º would make a compressed ogee. For those not up on the ellipse it is nothing more than a circle viewed at an angle. One definition is of it being made by a point in a plane scribing a constant distance from two other points on the same plane.

This one is an approximation of a circle tilted at 32º in the line of sight, if my calculations are correct.

Finally when one side is drawn to my satisfaction the information is transferred to the other side of the shelf unit:

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The ogee will be transferred after the first one is cut or the two pieces can be held together to cut at the same time.

All that is left now is the saw and chisel work.

jtk

[Stew Denton]

One more mostly amateur draftsman. Had 6 weeks of drafting in a high school woodworking class in the late 1960s, but there were two of us in the class that were good at math and we figured out how to do most of the more difficult drawing for the rest of the kids in the class.

I did get paid for some drafting at a couple of jobs I worked at. One was about 1/3rd of the time on the job, and was drawings of land usage, primarily using airplane taken land photographs, triangles, and architects rules. The other was at another job where the plant draftsman was tied up on a high priority job, and one of the bosses needed some preliminary drawings done on a big job. When my boss found out I could do and had done some drafting, my primary work was put on hold and I was "drafted" to use the plants back up drafting board to do the preliminary drawings. Once my drawings showed that the stuff could be built and everything would fit, they went ahead with the project, but of course the professional draftsman did the final drawings.

Now I still have my own low tech drafting stuff, some of it from 40+ years ago. It is quite low tech, "T"squares, triangles, engineering and architects rules, Pentel pencils, a drawing board I made a few years ago and an old (but functional) somewhat bigger commercial drawing board that the plant was going to throw out and gave to me that I use with the "T"squares, triangles, french curves, etc. (We are talking a 1940s (Maybe 1950s) wooden drawing board I think, but it has one of those nice green drafting pads that make it nice to work on.) I don't have a drafting machine, and don't have a place for one if I had it. I use my simple stuff once in a while, and it doesn't take up much room to store. The stuff is nice to have and I use it for bigger projects where just a free hand drawings with calculated and drawn in dimensions can some times get you into trouble.

I don't use the stuff enough to go a more high dollar route, and my stuff works for me.

Stew

[Mike Schnorr]

Interesting thread! About 30 years ago I was a draftsman at Marquip, Inc. in Northern Wisconsin (They made equipment for the corrugated industry). Enjoyed my work but I left due to corporate politics and opened my art studio. Still have all my tools upstairs in a stack of boxes along with one of those nifty wooden tables.
Too easy to use Sketch-Up these days for the simple projects I make but if I ever have time to unpack I think I'll set it up again just for fun! Thanks for the trip down Nostalgia Lane...

[Shawn Pixley]

I architecture school, I learned drafting with lead holders and pointers. I was usually the one to do the presentation drawings at the architecture firms. I still have all the tools and use them. I have added sketchup for some uses. I'd like to have my house plans converted to Cadd.