I still have my fathers from his machine shop. It has a tilting work board. It’s been in the top of the garage since 1971 and not used since 1963. It needs another home.
I started my working career on a board like that, complete with K&E band machine. The two problems with those machines were that 1) the bands would break, so you'd have to stop, change bands, readjust the machine.... 2) you could only tilt the board so much until you reached the point that the machine wouldn't stay where you put it, but would instead slide down the board to the bottom. That was resolved by putting a counterweight on a long arm extending over the top, past the top pulley. Worked really well unless your table happened to be in the front of a row, where someone could walk in front of it. Then it became crash helmet territory! Those machines were replaced with track machines which gave you more features, but I always preferred the old K&E band machines! I've still got an electric eraser and a bunch of templates, along with several slide charts, along with engineering scales, mechanical pencils and Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph pens. Fortunately I entered the workforce just as the slide rule was being replaced by the HP calculator (I don't remember the model, but I DO remember it cost me a week's wages!), so I didn't have to rely on that! I had a HELL of a time getting the decimal point in the right place in my calculations! Aww, the good ole days! Thanks for posting!!
My employer still does (architectural firm). He still lays out all the designs by hand, drafting table with a parallel bar. His designs are then scanned and modified in Photoshop for presentation. Contract documents are prepared with AutoCAD. He likes to maintain an overview only of the computer operations so he can demand the impossible
My dad was sort of a self taught engineer for most of my life. Him and mom were always bringing antiques home and had this thing in their house since before I had any real memories. Long story short this thing got disassembled and put in the rafters of the garage. Dad passed in 2019 and that was the one thing that I made sure to nab before it got thrown out or sold. Right now I've been using to make my door panels for my 47 Ford. I'm thinking when we move the living room in the basement to make that a little office area with the drafting table and a desk.
I still keep a Bruning Pro Trac set up in the basement. Still the best way for me to visualize a new suspension set up or a frame portion or bracket by sketching it out in half scale and sit there and ponder it awhile before translating to Fusion 360 or Inventor. You know you've been at it a few years when you wear out the knurling on an old school mechanical pencil.
I agree with your layout and thought process. CAD is fine, but I think to really understand what you're designing and how it will be made, the physical paper and pencil method results in a better overall outcome. The younger guys (who didn't grow up with pencil in hand) will argue that CAD makes things easier and better, but I strongly believe laying it out and going through the 'envisioning' step is best (at least for me, and other old farts).
Drafting table? I can only wish...I most often resort to napkins or if I'm lucky graph paper, I like to keep it on hand. I just use a ruler with graph paper most of the time. I once designed a project for my work on a table cloth in a restaurant while at a department dinner. My boss spent so much they let us take the table cloth! I hung it on the wall in my office...LOL
I wish I did but in this age of sleek and streamlined interiors there's no room for my wishes. I only have various t-squares, triangles and and a vintage Leroy lettering set. It's okay, though, I won't be designing anything.
I've still got my cheapy Sears kit drafting table in the basement office. I guess I'm still old school as I use t-squares. Put a new top and drawing mat on a few years back. Currently there's a drawing of a dirt modified chassis on it. But being half Scots i.e. cheap, I don't use real drawing paper. I've got a big roll of brown wrapping paper and use that instead. At the rate I've been using it, it should last for the rest of my life.
Made my first drawing today Need a adapter/spacer to mount a model T steering wheel on my model A V8 speedster Sure does make more sense when you draw it out then looking at chicken scratch on a little post it note
What a fun nostalgic thread to read through. I learned to draft in HS in the late 60’s, graduated college in ‘76 (ME) and did a lot of pencil on vellum drafting on boards like these in my first three jobs until AutoCad showed up in ‘84. I ended up using SolidWorks 3D solids from ‘95 until 2016 when I retired, amazing how much work one guy could get done in SW 3D compared to a room full of guys with drafting machines/ pencils/ vellum. I still remember the ammonia smelling of the Diazo blue line machines, the cool thing hand-held electric erasers and metal eraser shields, dry transfer sheets, making so many revisions we’d wear holes in the vellum, having to request and pick-up folded blue lines stamped “Released” from “Documentation” where all the vellum originals were kept in those big vertical hanging files, the good old days…!
Being an engineer, I still use my ancient drafting tools for certain projects for my hot rods and other small things.. I always use Velum, sometimes with ink. Did the set of design/construction "blueprints" for my current house (20 years ago though). Probably won't do that again!
I have one in my barn that was my dad's, and his dad's before that, and his dad's before that. It's from the 20s, so I've been told. It looks it, it's really cool. Dad had all the slide rules of every sort you guys are posting, all that stuff. He also had a lot of signs hanging in his home office. My favorite said: "Experience is that which makes a journeyman know, almost as much as an apprentice THINKS he knows."
Funny story about those ammonia print developers. In drafting class in hs, about the same time as you 1970-71, my drawing table was in the back corner just in front of the blueprint developer. One day it leaked most of the ammonia which ran under my stool. And gassed me. When I came to in the nurse's office, I had a clean dry gym shirt on, and was gasping for air. Of course Ms. Burkhart, aka soakit, used smelling salts tobring me around. And we all know what that is... Ammonia! Oh, and the knot on the back of my head probably explains what's wrong with me to this day... And just came across a picture of my el cheapo drawing table.
HRJ, So you're a spittin' image of Freewheelin' Franklin! He was Mr. Natural's friend, as I recall! Franklin wore a hat though, I believe...My business card has a caricature of me, I had an artist draw it as a small conductor with a baton. My wife likes to say it's when I have <cough> more hair. Luckily I haven't gone bald yet...but if I do I already have a Porsche...
When FoMoCo switched from drawing boards to CAD for body design, some of their drafting equipment went up for auction. My buddy who was a designer at the R & E Center where we both worked scored a couple sets of sweeps. He gave me one and also a "trolley guided" T square that rides on pulleys and cables. It is made of two different woods laminated together - ash and mahogany I think. I have mused about which parts of early cars may have been laid out at Ford Engineering using these tools. That would be fun to know. I have yet to set up the T square on a table but I use the sweeps (often called "body sweeps" or "mold sweeps") frequently for body fabrication. EDIT: T square trammel photo added.
Like FF, I've got some old school engineering tools. Should the power go out, like in Escape from LA, I'm ready. Slide rule, old school drafting instruments, and a K&E compensating polar planimeter. If you remember your calculus, you remember finding the area under the curve. Well this thing was used in the days of x-y graphs, either drawn by hand or near the advent of the pc, an x-y pen plotter, to accurately calculate the area under the curve. Think of those little devices that let you measure distance on a map. This thing is like that, sort of. The genius of it was in the linkage. When set up properly, the wheel would roll, slide, or roll and slide.So when you traced an x-y plot completely around, and had it set properly, it gave the area inside of the plot. Yes there's more to it than that, but that's the gist of it.
The Jalopy Journal
