You Know You're an old Cad Drafter when.....
(Stolen off the web with no
remorse.....)
...(you) remember how to control lineweights by rolling the pencil as you
draw - John Cabrall
...you remember that a spline is something you rest weights on, to draw a
curve - Bob Doncom
...you are asked if a Leroy Lettering Set is a package of fonts for AutoCad
(and where they can be downloaded) - S. Yoder
...you are asked why there is sandpaper on
a stick in your drawer - S. Yoder
...you think you should own stock in the plastic's industry because of all
the templates you own - S. Yoder
…does anyone remember the joy of hand drafting on vellum, for the first time?
- Unknown
...you have a set of railroad curves and a beam compass. - Michael Pekarik
...when someone says scale, you ask architect or engineering? - Michael
Pekarik
…you were lucky enough to get Ralph Smoley (remember
Smoley's) to be your
teacher for a ICS course in engineering. - JLW
…you remember the pain of an ammonia paper cut. - Bernd A. Hoffmann
…You know how to dress a ruling pen - Dennis Shinn
…You rue the day they quit making drafting linen. - Dennis Shinn
…A compass was for drawing arcs and circles and not finding the North pole. -
Dennis Shinn
I can even remember these "weights" being called "ducks", which for the kids
is the origin of the phrase "getting you ducks in a row". - Spencer A. Darby
Ducks?, I recall them being called "Whales", (due to the way they
looked)...but I like your explanation better. - Ralph E. Wagner
…You know that some pencil sharpeners only remove the wood and don't sharpen
the lead - Carl Taylor
…You know that the little piece of thin metal with all of the holes is called
an erasing shield. - Carl Taylor
…or, if you remember filling your inking pen with an eyedropper. After first
adjusting the linewidth by turning a knurled wheel on the side of the pen and
"measuring" the width of the pen points. - Dennis Staley
…You know what to do with a crow quill! - Coyote Tech
…you look for the slide rule icon. - Chris
…your back has formed the perfect curve for the Leroy lettering position. -
Chris
…you remember coming home after a good hunt, having a well done mammoth stake
for dinner, laying out a new design of dinosaur trap on the wall of your
cave..... I bet no one can beat this :) - Vladimir Makarkin
…You keep your electric eraser out and visible just
because it's been such a
good friend. - dmitzel
…you had a use for a dead mouse. - joseph_a._sullivan
We used to have something that used to be wiped over the drawing sheet to
remove finger grease and thereby allow the ink to take properly. This was a
small cloth bag filled with a powder which found its way through the holes in
the bag, and was about the size of a dead mouse, and our nickname for it was
"mouse". Of course, this was well before the days of the PC. - Ian A. White
I remember little pounce shakers sorta like disposable cardboard table salt
shakers (a brand call Scum-X) as well as the pounce bags. - Art Martinez
How about when you ask someone to pass the "scumbag" or the can of "scum-x",
and it's taken as a derogatory comment? - Daniel C. Gassmann
…You own (and know how to use) proportional dividers. - NLAGO
…You have handmade scales from Alteneder & Sons ( in Philadelphia) -
NLAGO
…you know what a CAP Drafter is - Brian W Caldwell
…Remember put tape around your templates about an 1/8 from the edge so that
the ink wouldn't spread out under the templates. I still have the marks on my
triangles from that tape - Larry Ulrich
…You know that you are an OLD Cad Drafter if you consider the electric eraser
to be a new-fangled gadget invented by the Devil himself. BTW, my old English
boss told me once that they used to paint over the drawings (with water colours)
before they'd be sent to the Contractor (eg. brick would be one colour, concrete
would be another, etc.). When I asked him what would happen if someone made a
change, he just shrugged his shoulders, and said, "Well, you would just started
again." Was he pulling my leg? Any REALLY old farts out there that can atest to
this? - Nick Bogut
..ammonia vapors ....graphite ground into the elbows & knuckles ..pocket
protectors ...slide rules on our belts ....spinal curvature Who remebers
developing real blueprints (not whiteprints thru a machine) or the Ames
lettering guide? (I knew the inventor/manufacturer). How about the Timely
ellipse templates? - Jim Stevenson
Does anyone else rue the day they quit making "Ruby" erasers or does any one
else even remember them? - R. G. Thompson
…The tweezers you used to use for lifting appliques now come in real handy
for plucking ear hair. - Patrick Hughes
…Except Him maybe. One would have to have a really good set of prints to
built this world for six days. - Vladimir Makarkin
Right. Build it in six days, spend five billion years on the revisions. -
Harv
And you know what Higgins and T. Alteneder were used for. - Harv
Who's old enough to remember wooden triangles? .... I found a copy of 1935
K&E catalog and a 1937 Dietzgen catalog. Well, lo and behold the '35 catalog
had wooden triangles but the '37 edition didn't. - Art Martinez
You are NOT old unless you spell it "draughtsman",... - Joe Mills
Yes....I learned that trick and how to make circles with a pencil....some
string and a hat pin! - Johnnie
I still have a headache from 'scribing - scribe coats' while looking into a
'light table'. For you young farts, a scribe coat was one layer of a map, a
plastic film that had to be 'etched and scratched' away. All of the various
scribe coats were then shot with a BIG camera and plates were made out of the
negatives, for offset printing. The tools we used to etch and scratch the
plastic off of the scribe coats looked like dental equipment. - Dave Kramer
…your Beam Compass is the longest tool you own - and it has an extension bar
to make it longer!! - Mike
…your masking tape is so dried out that the roll can not be separated under
any circumstances at all, ever. - Mike
Hee hee... What a great thread... Even *I* feel like an old fart now, and I'm
only 29, far from being a dinosaur. I'm bummed out that I missed a bunch of the
earlier posts. Yup, I remember the watering eyes and bubbling of the bottle of
ammonia while running bluelines and trimming the prints with a utility knife and
a straightedge, the taped-up triangles, scumbags, cans of Pounce, swabbing old
drawings down with Bestine to lift off grease and other grunge so they'd take
ink better (Ooo... my fingers feel tingly... Hmm.. can says 'Avoid contact with
skin... may cause nerve damage.) I remember Ames lettering guides, Timely
Templates, and those purple pencils that wouldn't print on blueline, much time
spent trying to unclog pens, and of course those yellow Koh-I-Noor erasers were
always a must, as long as they were a little wet... Just when I got really fast
at Leroying, we got a 'Cadliner'... *Huh?* Actually I almost accidentally
electrocuted myself once with the little bastard... but that's another funny
story. I remember pasting down stickybacks with a burnisher, only one shot at
getting it on right with no bubbles, but first spraying them down with fixative
so the toner wouldn't flake off... Chartpak tape... all that good stuff... Yeow... just remembered another good one... making sepias on the blueline
machine, upside-down, so that you could make revisions by erasing the shiny
emulsion side and drafting on the matte site... Brings back many ill memories.
And to think, nowadays we get these wee little puppy student interns who stare
at me wide-eyed and full of disbelief, who groan and shake their heads when I
tell them "When CAD was..." war stories about plotting out survey points on a
9-pin dot-matrix printer and tracing them onto hand drawings, about working on
4.77 Mhz 8088 XTs with only 512k of RAM, 320k 5-1/2" floppies, 5 or 10MB hard
drives, CGA, or monochrome Hercules graphics, how EGA was a big deal at the
time, AutoCAD release 2 (I think we had DCA, now Softdesk Civil, release 2.62
also), waiting well over an hour for a drawing to emerge from the old pen
plotter, only to then find out one of the pens dried out or clogged, and then
touching them up by hand... - David G. Smith
Let's all grab our shoebox of program cards, run down to the campus computer
center and spend the next three hours key-punching data cards so we can run a
plot (provided we can reserve space/time) of a few geometric shapes. - Dennis
Shinn
Sad to realize we've lost most of the "glamour" from our profession!
..ammonia vapors ....graphite ground into the elbows & knuckles ..pocket
protectors ...slide rules on our belts ....spinal curvature - Jim Stevenson
Yeah - now we've got; Eyestrain; Repetitive stress syndrome; Bone spurs on
our neck vertebrae; Ozone from the printer fuser; Arthritis; See what you have
to look forward to, kids! - Dennis Shinn
…If you know what "Asses and elbows" means. - Steve Rockwell
Do you still have your erasing shield and rectangular 2 color hand-held
erasers? - Donald G. Bailey
How about the Great Template jokes... 'Hey, Do you have a cloud template...'
or the ever popular.. 'Do you have a left-handed circle template?...' - Gavin
Sharpe
...you use your T-square for reaching things that fall under your desk. -
Donald Linsenbach
...you hang onto those 3 boxes of eraser strips for sentimental reasons, and
to fix small errors on plots (gasp).- Donald Linsenbach
...your can of Borco is rusty.- Donald Linsenbach
...there's still one of those funny little brushes in your desk drawer for
cleaning out your Spiroll.- Donald Linsenbach
...there isn't a single speck of eraser dust on the floor, or in your
eyebrows.- Donald Linsenbach
...all your office chairs are 18" high rather than 36" high.- Donald
Linsenbach
...the words: Mayfair & Ranger give you a Deja Vu.- Donald Linsenbach
...the words '...sepias changes' don't make the hair stand up on the back of
your neck. - Donald Linsenbach
You know your an "old drafter" when your "tape ball" is as big as a
basketball. - Greg Gootee
You know you're an old draftsman if you still have a tape ball - Bradley
Bennett
Old Drafters never die, they simply draw to an end.... - Bruce
Engebretsen
you know you are an old cad drafter
... when you have a railroad pen. - Neil Jordan
...when you can use a polar planimeter to take areas off drawings, and do it
faster than the CADD technician, and without batteries. - Neil Jordan
...when you know what a hatchet planimeter is. - Neil Jordan
...when you manually developed bluelines by rolling up the print and dropping
it in the vertical tube with ammonia. - Neil Jordan
...when you can clean a Rapidograph point by taking out the pin and forcing
cleaner through the point by using a q-tip as a plunger. 0 pens make passable
squirt guns. - Neil Jordan
...when you are the only one in the office with a functional Rapidograph, and
they come to you when they need to sign mylars because your ink is the only
stuff that sticks. - Neil Jordan
...when your extra large bottle of Pelikan ink is so old that the carbon has
settled and you have to shake it up each time.- Neil Jordan
How many of us remember taping 8 1/2" x 11" sheets of blank paper to a
complicated drawing you were working on to keep the graphite from smugging all
over the drawing and being ground into your elbows and wrists? - Tim Momsen
Or making all your calculations on a slide-rule instead of a calculator. -
Tim Momsen
Does anybody remember the first 4 function Texas Instruments calculator that
cost about $250.00 with the glowing red LED's that burned the batteries up in
about 2 weeks and couldn't be read in direct sun light? - Tim Momsen
You still get teary-eyed when you hear the term Jewel-Tips. - Chaz You
still remember that linen sheets are not only for your bed. - Chaz You keep
trianlges with tape on the back of them. - Chaz Your kids ask: Whats
Kooh-i-noor? - Chaz
you still write in CAPITAL LETTERS in every day life - Enzo
you remember watching, in horror, as your masterpiece was slowly being - Mike
Warner mangled as it was feeding through the blue print machine. - Mike
Warner Or if you have ever cut your drawing in half by using a too sharp 9H
pencil. - Mike Warner
or being knocked to the floor half conscious after leaving the cap off the -
SMA ammonia bottle for just a bit too long - SMA
or you come home with black long sleeve cuffs. - TheSkipster
I used to do 12' long 1/2 scale turbine engine assemblies and had to print
them on one of those ROTOLITE machines and develop them in a tube sitting on top
of a bowl of ammonia. - Jim B.
you still have the little black dot on the top of your thigh from the time
that you dropped your 9H layout leadholder that you had just sharpened and tried
to catch it and all you succeeded in doing was jabbing it 1/2" into your leg. -
Jim B.
You haven't done BLUEprints if you haven't done white-lines-on-blue *wet*
prints. In high school, when I got ahead of the classwork, the teacher made me
the "blueprint technician" for his classes, which meant I got to run the print
room. Ours was "modern," which meant we used fluorescent lights (instead of arc
lamps) to expose the prints; after a 5-minute exposure, they went thru a tray of
yellow liquid, and were hung on racks over a drip-pan to dry. Those yellow
stains stayed on my hands until well into the following summer... - Paul
Turvil
My mahogany T-square with an adjustable head. - Eddie The clamp-on
aluminum angle at the T-square edge of my plywood board top to keep everything
staright and parallel. - Eddie The red bricks (three I think) under the top
edge of my board for tilt. - Eddie Draftsman's aprons. - Eddie The empty
Coca-Cola crate under the board to stand on when I needed to work on the top
edge of my drawing. - Eddie My K & E slide rule. Couldn't afford $800 H.P. calculator. - Eddie Making hooks on my lamp out of paper clips to hold
templates and mounting them with masking tape. - Eddie The holes in my
drawings when the masking tape dried out enough to let the clips and triangles
fall down onto my board. - Eddie Wooden triangles and scales (such accuracy).
- EddieA yard stick for a beam compass. - Eddie I still have my first
drafting brush. - Eddie The metal tool box just big enough to hold 10"
triangles & 12" scales. - Eddie Saving for months so I could afford to
buy one of those new electric erasers. - Eddie Hooking that electric eraser
to the post of my table with more paper clips. - Eddie Replacing the chuck in
my eraser after I dropped it. - Eddie Coffee grinder lead pointers. -
Eddie The internal doubts and fears when they delivered Autocad Version 2.18
and gave me a half-hour training course on the hot new AT (286) computer with a
20MB hard drive. - Eddie
... you will die with that notch and bump on the middle finger of your hand
just behind the fingernail. - Stephen S ... you even know what I'm talking
about above. - Stephen S
.. You still have a bunch of small 'FULLERTON' bean bags laying around on
your desk. In the old days, you used the weighted bean bags to 'temporarily'
keep papers on your slanted drafting desktop. - Steve .. You still know how
to use the large masonite perspective radius aids, which , when used pinned at
the sides of your drawings, and used conjunction with a special AMES Bonded
Acrylic Tee Square, you could draw perspectives with distant vanishing
points. - Steve .. When drawing pen on mylar, your can draw 'perfect' dashed
lines by drawing a 'continuous' line, and then using the 'green' filler in the
electric eraser in conjunction with the dots on the erasing shields to form the
spaces. - Steve .. Your definition of "New Technology" was first quill on
linen to rapidograph on mylar. Then it was stainless steel tips to jewel and
tungsten. Then it was two-sided mylar. Then it was drafting machines. Then the
ultimate... sonic cleaners. - Steve .. You always kept small, 3x3 pieces of
scrap mylar on your desk to get the pens working. After a while it was
completely scribbled over, and you need to pull out a new scrap. - Steve ..
You hid away your primo '000' and '00' pens tips for special occasions. It
didn't take a whole lot of use, especially with the stainless steel tips for a
'000' to become a '00' and then an '0'. No one could borrow these pens, because
no one new of this special stash. - Steve .. You could deal with having to
clean clogged rapidographs, but the real nightmares started with they started to
'bleed'. - Steve .. Pounce was your friend, but if you failed to brush every
little piece away, pounce remnants became land mines for your pens. -
Steve .. You can remember working with pen on mylar drawings started by other
'so - called' draftsman. Even when you erased their lines, the lines remained
permanently etched in the surface of the mylar. - Steve . By the time you got
to the 3rd and 4th revisions, the mylar coating was gone - and the ink would
just bead on the mylar. - Steve .. Pencil on mylar - you remember going to
spray 'fixative' on a finished masterpiece, only to have on big 'yellow' glob
attached itself to the drawing and run all over it. - Steve .. You cringed
every time you had to put a real large piece of zipatone or sticky-back on your
drawing and the dreaded bubbles showed up, or it gets started at the wrong
angle.. - Steve . You remember two sided mylar, and inking the base topo on
the back, so that when the inevitable changes came, you did not have to erase
your background. - Steve Mirrored lettering was a real art. - Steve . You
used to burn a 'sepia' of the background before you added the design elements
(usually reverse). That way, when the design changed, your background was still
intact. - Steve . You remember the real 'artist' was the one who could place
perfect leroy lettering around a small radius curve. - Steve .. The Ames
lettering guide was a pain, you kept several 8.5" xeroxes with ruled lines,
which you place underneath the mylar to use as guidelines. - Steve . You kept
several 'rubber-bands', with even increments marked in ball-point in your
drawer. You could prorate dimensions and interpolate contours by stretching the
rubber band between points. - Steve .. You had zillions of french curves -
but only one favorite that could be used for just about any application. -
Steve .. You remember that everyone in the office smoked and drank coffee. If
you didn't you were a commie, and couldn't be trusted. Leroying, holding the
template guide with the left hand, and holding on to the stylus with the right
hand and a butt between the fingers of that hand was the ultimate job skill.
Coffee was kept in the top right drawer of the drafting table. If you ever
spilled anyone's coffee, you best apply for a new job. - Steve
Ink on starched linen - B.C. Jones Plastic lead on Mylar - B.C. Jones
Old drafters never die, their life just becomes long and drawn out. - Phil
Hontz
...you still yell at the pen plotter that it's missed a line while it's still
printing (and you think it listens to you because later it goes back and draws
it in). - S. Yoder
...you get aggravated that a mega-buck CAD program (still) won't allow you to
change the linetype of a dimension extension line if you keep it as a dimension
object. - S. Yoder
...you are still faster with your slide rule and scratch paper than
attempting a formula in a spreadsheet. - S. Yoder
...you can hand letter faster than you can type on the keyboard. - S.
Yoder
Also on the list should be: 2 step eradicator for the sepia revisions - L.
Bliss Trying to find left-handed drafting arm or Leroy bug - L.
Bliss Using my Dad's old Dietzgen set in the box with blue velvet lining - L.
Bliss Elaborate north arrows - L. Bliss Pennies taped on the back of
templates so you could ink - L. Bliss Using the x-acto knife for many things
including splicing in new piece of vellum when the overly revised area had
holes, or chipping the ink off of mylar before we had mylar erasers - L.
Bliss Elasticized slip on sleeve protectors that went to your elbows - L.
Bliss
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