Drawing

[willshak]

Wait. I come across stuff I have scribbled down on paper a week or so ago, and I can't read it. Years ago, people would tell me that I had the most readable notes.

[Leon]

As long as I was still doing both, both came out well. Girls used to be jealous. BUT once I stopped drawing and using the computer for CAD they both pretty much went down hill from there.

[Swingman]

My "sketchbook" just happens to be on my hard drive, where I "brainstorm, and refine ideas before committing to ... a final design".

I just use a mouse ... a pencil/pen slows me down.

[Swingman]

A teacher made my left-handed daughter write right-handed. Upshot is that she is basically now ambidextrous with regard to most tasks.

[dpb]

Similar misguided teacher but even worse--this one wanted all the tablets lined up the same way on the desks as she looked at them so forced me from the correct way as left-handed to the upside-down crabbed thing one sees fairly often w/ those who aren't taught correctly.

Still suffer from it--by time Mom figure out what was going on, I was seemingly beyond recovery despite having tried to break the habit over the years.

I'm pretty much ambidextrous--throw righty, write/eat lefty. Tore up shoulder in HS b-ball and taught self to write righty enough to get by until it healed enough to begin to use again...

[Larry Jaques]

Reduce the overhead. Right. Be sure to overthink it. It's critical at this point, lad.

Uh, yeah. ;)

Hey, hey hey. Save those detailed jobs for later on, once you have a feel for this drawing/sketching thing, OK?

-- To know the road ahead, ask those coming back. -- Chinese Proverb

[Larry Jaques]

Remember, Grasshoppa, just because someone is writing for a magazine does not make them a Master, and one way is not the only way. Look at the vast theoretical and practical differences between the finish masters Jewitt, Dresdner, and Flexner. Compare Lord Roy and that plaid-shirted clown with the funny accent.

-- To know the road ahead, ask those coming back. -- Chinese Proverb

[Larry Jaques]

To know the road ahead, ask those coming back. -- Chinese Proverb

[Larry Jaques]

It's good that she handled it well. Ambidexterity is a _definite_ bonus in life. As a mechanic, I had to learn how to thread a nut onto a bolt upside down, offhanded, and out of sight, while holding the flange with one finger, the washer with another, and the nut with the other two. One learns to think in 3 dimensions after doing a couple of those types of projects. It's great. I hope you encourage your girl to go for it!

-- To know the road ahead, ask those coming back. -- Chinese Proverb

[Bill]

I just returned from the used book store. There was not a (suitable) mechanical drawing book in the place. I did examine a book containing designs of woodworking projects. Looking at the drawings it contained made me appreciate much better the connection to mechanical drawing that you, Leon and Lew have been advocating. Many of the other drawing books had drawings of naked people in them without even one piece of furniture--let alone dove tail joinery! Someone told me that in college that the engineering students and the art students were on completely different parts of campus. That it was like 2 different worlds. Having examined the drawing books for myself, I understand that facts all that much better now... : )

Thanks all for the drawing lesson!

Bill

[RonB]

There are a lot of good books on drafting and the one I would recommend, if you can find one, is "Engineering Drawing" by French and Verick (sp). I went through a pretty intensive two year course in Design Technology during the mid 1960's and this was the bible for drafting. This was board drafting with drafting machines or parallel bars, triangles, instruments, etc. I later went through company- sponsored courses in CAD and CATIA. The heart of understanding drafting, and creation of working drawings, is the understanding and practice of orthographic projection. I'll draw fire for this, but most of the young draftsmen and engineers who go through drafting today have no Idea what projection is. You have to control the layout, but the machine does most of the projection for you. Learning the basics of projection will give you a much better idea of how, and why, the various sides of an object relate.

I do shop sketches for most of my bigger projects on a drawing board in the basement that is equipped with an old, very stable parallel bar. I don't develop fancy drawings. Most of the shop sketches are on par with what we might call conceptual layouts; and my quality would probably drive my old instructors nuts. I am not even tempted to acquire a CAD package or even use Sketchup. I get a much better idea of how a cabinet or other project will fit together by thinking it through on the table.

Side Note: It used to drive my wife nuts when she would ask how big something was and I would hold my fingers apart and say 3-1/2" inches. She would respond that isn't 3-1/2"! I would hold the pose until she got a ruler and was usually pretty darned close. After several years on the drafting table, doing aircraft drawings by hand, I developed a pretty good micrometer eyeball. I have been off of the board for about 25-30 years but I still have a pretty good eye for sizes in the 0-36" range.

RonB

[Swingman]

For some reason I'm that ways with thicknesses ... I can generally tell in a photo how thick a table top, leg, etc. is ... and am seldom off by an 1/8" in real life, but totally miss the boat with metric.

[Han]

Swingman wrote in news:bu- dncj2ctS_b2rQnZ2dnUVZ [e-mail]:

Every eighth of an inch is 3 mm; an inch is 2.54 cm; a foot is 30 cm; a yard 90 cm; a mile is a lot.

(in dutch speak)

[Swingman]

LOL ... there's an app for that! ;)

[Swingman]

Seems most of the Festool stuff is incremented in mm.

I have a Calculated Industries construction calculator on both my DroidX, and the real thing in the shop, that I'm continually inputting the likes of 21 3/16" to give me 538.1625mm to set my parallel guide rails when cutting sheet goods to size.

I'm good to go ... as long as the electrons are flowing. :)

[Bill]

Thanks RonB. I just ordered the 1966 edition for $6.94 including S&H. Newer editions ceded to graphing technology, and I don't wish to read about 1970s graphing technology! : ) Thank you for the suggestion; based upon your experience with it, I'm sure I'll enjoy it. I may need to assemble a make-shift drafting table...

I hope Larry appreciates that I just dug deep and made the purchase instead of hemming and hawing and "over thinking" it! ; )

Bill

I went through a pretty intensive two year course in

I'll draw fire for this, but

[Lew Hodgett]

------------------------------ French & Vierck.

Still have mine, it's an eighth edition, published 1953.

Lew

[Larry Jaques]

I would't expect there to be. Free and cheap CAD programs took over nearly thirty years ago.

Misogynists and Chauvinists could have detected same in those books.

Indeed. Engineering students are concerned with function while art students are concerned only with form, to the exclusion of function.

Jewelcome.

-- To know the road ahead, ask those coming back. -- Chinese Proverb

[Larry Jaques]

You're not good with those _big_ numbers, eh, Swingy?

I was a lot better with sizes when I had to wrench bolts all day every day. My eyes were in dial caliper mode, I think. Ditto when I was working as a QA inspector and had a surface plate in front of me at least part of every week.

-- To know the road ahead, ask those coming back. -- Chinese Proverb

[Larry Jaques]

Sacre bleu! Not only am I stunned, but I have a neener: I found it for a PENNY on Amazon.

Congrats. I hope you and Ron see things the same way, draftwise.

-- To know the road ahead, ask those coming back. -- Chinese Proverb