Oh man, drafting....Its one of my passions in life. I grew up around the Detroit metro area in the burbs and I remember as a 13 yr old already being into art type shit, there was a auto drafting shop on the corner of 2 major streets in my town. And one day when I walked by it and saw the huge ass drafting tables and rolled up drawings I knew then that this was what I was meant to do.
We had the standard drafting classes in high school, but we also had vocational training as well when you left school for 1/2 day and spent that in drafting class. I did that for my junior and senior years. They also introduced CAD in those classes with autocad.
I went on to get an associates degree in Auto Body Design in a local community college which also placed me in a co-op job at a design house. And thus my career began. I went on to get a BSME later working my way through it.
Sadly by the time I went into the industry it was all pretty much done with CAD. And by a few years in manual drafting was pretty much eliminated.
But one thing you guys might not know is that automotive drafting was not done on paper, it was too dimensionally unstable since the drawings themselves were used as masters. They had sheet metal plates that were sprayed with white and used either aluminum or gold to scribe lines into it. Aluminum or gold sharpened on 2 sides making a wedge, as it would make the finest lines .1mm thick. Then later these plates would be taken and blueprints made out of them. But the plates themselves were the masters. LAter in the late 70s-80s they stopped using these plates in lieu of mylar, basically plastic sheets with one side of it having texture which was a game changer since it was dimensionally stable and way easier to use than the plates of metal since you could use pencils and erase mistakes. I tried to search for pictures of these plates on the net but I could not find any. Some of these plates today are used as artwork adorning some engineering offices, true pieces of art and lost skill.
Man, that's honestly fascinating. I don't know I just have a real appreciation for people that are able to do that type of work, or have that skill.
Guy I worked with who taught me most of what I know about construction was a civil engineer. He used to do drafting by hand, and we had projects we worked on together where something just wasn't shaking out based on the prints.
He would sit in our office trailer, and if we were having to make a change, draw it all out, and then we'd submit it to the architect and the structural engineer for approval.
It's funny because maybe had I known about drafting and whatever, it's something I would have gotten into because art was my big thing growing up, but I was told you can't make a living doing art. I wish I would have at least been pushed into areas where those skills would have translated.
I know there was a conversation maybe a week or so ago about drafting classes in school, and perhaps if I would have had something like that, I'd have been all over it.
I just think it's a super cool skill, and extremely important / useful. I'm sure
Borzak
is a wizard, and probably
Zapatta
. But sad thing is will probably get into a point where nobody's going to remember how to do it, or they're just going to rely upon AI.
deadline.com
