Proper Drafting Technique

[Akash Rastogi]

Hey CD,

Our team teaches traditional drafting (using good ol' hands) along with CAD. I wanted to know what other teams teach this to their students and also to get suggestions for books/resources we could use for further teaching. This could also include available drawing kits/stencils/tools in stores. I find that it is a lot of fun being able to hand draw designs and mechanisms so I try to break out the graphing notebook whenever possible. Any help is appreciated.

I hope there's engineers or draftsmen on here that still do a lot of full hand drawings. I saw some on 234's site and I found it so cool for some reason. haha

Regarding the time of this post- I'm all hopped up on Red Bull and soda right now ..yea I love studying for physics that much -_-

[Cory]

We taught very basic hand drafting skills just as a prelude to CAD. The hope was that doing it by hand would help the students to understand 3 view orthographic projections, how to represent features with hidden lines, etc.

All our actual design work is done in Solidworks.

You should check out 111's website. They have quite a few ridiculously detailed/complex hand drawn prints.

[Molten]

One of the coaches on 1766 was a draftsmen in the industry for many years. He likes to make sure that the people on the drafting team know how to manually draft even if it isn't always used extensively.

My suggestion: To make each student manually draft a screw in detail. It really helps them respect the art. You can't really master something, if you don't have a healthy respect for it. I'm not really sure where he got the actual drafting tools though....sorry I can't be more help.

[sanddrag]

In middle school I took a real, old-fashioned drafting class, and it was fantastic! We had the proper drafting tables, boards, T-squares, pencils, erasers, scales, triangles and everything. We were taught proper block lettering, arrows, line weights, pencil holding, etc. Unfortunately, I don't think you'll find this too often in schools today.

On 696, I would typically do a pre-season "workshop" that would cover the same basic things Cory mentioned, along with some dimensioning and tolerancing.

For some books, Interpreting Engineering Drawings by Cecil H. Jensen is a good one, that has a lot of good workbook-style exercises inside.

Fundamentals of Graphics Communication by Gary R. Bertolini and Eric N. Wiebe is another one I have that Cal Poly has required, although I haven't read this one much.

Regarding the time of this post, I call it studying for college finals.

[Scott L.]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

In middle school I took a real, old-fashioned drafting class, and it was fantastic! We had the proper drafting tables, boards, T-squares, pencils, erasers, scales, triangles and everything. We were taught proper block lettering, arrows, line weights, pencil holding, etc. Unfortunately, I don't think you'll find this too often in schools today.

On 696, I would typically do a pre-season "workshop" that would cover the same basic things Cory mentioned, along with some dimensioning and tolerancing.

For some books, Interpreting Engineering Drawings by Cecil H. Jensen is a good one, that has a lot of good workbook-style exercises inside.

Fundamentals of Graphics Communication by Gary R. Bertolini and Eric N. Wiebe is another one I have that Cal Poly has required, although I haven't read this one much.

Regarding the time of this post, I call it studying for college finals.

I took Drafting in Middle school, and actually have all the drafting tools. The book we used in school and that I have is: "Exploring Drafting fundamentals of Technology" byJohn R. Walker. Published in 1987
I also Have the book: "drafting fundamentals 1" by Street, Cleland, Earle

[MrForbes]

I have enough of a challenge getting students to make sketches....hmmmm....

[Dave Scheck]

Originally Posted by Cory

You should check out 111's website. They have quite a few ridiculously detailed/complex hand drawn prints.

Courtesy of Raul. Anybody that has seen his design book will know how much time and effort he puts into our robots.

The drawings from the design book are transferred to a CAD program (used to be ProE, now I think they're using Autodesk) to create the blueprints for the fabricators. There are portions of the robot that are designed solely in CAD, but the more critical parts seem to be hand drawn first.

By the end, most if not the entire robot is in CAD and things like capacity and clearance can be visually tested before fabrication.

[EricH]

I got it in middle school using the D.I.M.E. blocks and then again in my art class. I can still do a reasonably accurate sketch of a 3D object freehand, if I need to, but I prefer to at least have a ruler if possible.

[Chris Fultz]

I believe the PLTW curriculum starts with pencil and paper and basics.

[Dillon Carey]

Originally Posted by Chris Fultz

I believe the PLTW curriculum starts with pencil and paper and basics.

Yes, PLTW does begin learning how to draw multiview and orthographic views.
You also learn what all of the different lines mean: hidden, center, etc.

[mplanchard]

I too like Jensen, but also try "Basic Blueprint Reading and Sketching" by Olivo. This is out of print - but search for a used copy. Used older books are fairly inexpensive, search for names like "Technical Drawing", "Engineering Drawing" or "Engineering Graphics". Sketching is an important skill but more importantly you want to make certain you can read the drawing and detail a drawing - whether you use a manual method or a CAD tool. I used to give my students a drawing and tell them to make the part in SolidWorks. If you want to see what our first level certification exam, check out the sample exam at www.solidworks.com/cswa - you need to read a drawing inorder to make the model. Everyone who asked for sponsorship this year got coupon codes to take the CSWA exam for free. These are the skills our customers are looking for from young designers. It is not so important that you can sketch perfectly with a pencil - it is more important that you can interpret the drawing and create an accurate drawing with all the necessary dimensions and annotations. Marie

[scottydoh]

Im in my second year of architecture school, so I do alot of hand drafting, in fact, we have grade deductions if you use the computer even the tiniest bit to help your drawings. I know when it comes to architectural drawing manuals, D.K. Ching is like a god. I found hand drafting for hours makes you really understand what ever your drawing. Much respect for the old schoolers who still actually draft.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Fundamentals of Graphics Communication by Gary R. Bertolini

As someone who has met Dr. Bertolini, I have to also recommend this book. We used it extensively as a baseline in some of our early classes and it really covers a wealth of knowledge for drafting, CAD, visualization, etc. The older editions are pretty much the same as the new editions so you could get them for pretty cheap too.

[,4lex S.]

As useful as proper technical drawing skills are usefull, I think AutoCAD is a better place for this kind of drawing to be made. It is considerably faster, and produces something that can be easily moved around and manipulated. As cool as they look, I don't think they are worth the time nowadays.

I think if I was going to do any initial graphics instruction or work with an FRC team, I would try to teach freehand sketching. When it comes to graphics communication, the most important thing is usually the freehand; its fast, easy, and transmits more information per unit time used than other methods. As long as you teach it from a technical perspective (cutting planes, proper views, proper solid creation...) it gives a strong basis for 3D CAD instruction as well. A good 40% of my first year university graphics course was pure freehand, in order to lay the foundation for AutoCAD and Unigraphics.

[scottydoh]

Originally Posted by ,4lex S.

As useful as proper technical drawing skills are usefull, I think AutoCAD is a better place for this kind of drawing to be made. It is considerably faster, and produces something that can be easily moved around and manipulated. As cool as they look, I don't think they are worth the time nowadays.

I think if I was going to do any initial graphics instruction or work with an FRC team, I would try to teach freehand sketching. When it comes to graphics communication, the most important thing is usually the freehand; its fast, easy, and transmits more information per unit time used than other methods. As long as you teach it from a technical perspective (cutting planes, proper views, proper solid creation...) it gives a strong basis for 3D CAD instruction as well. A good 40% of my first year university graphics course was pure freehand, in order to lay the foundation for AutoCAD and Unigraphics.

I agree that as far as technical drawings, CAD is far superior, and I agree that in the FIRST setting, CAD should be taught more than hand drafting.

Not to discredit CAD renderings which in themselves are stunning...
But, I would like to argue the point that aside from looking "cool", I feel that drawing every single line and detail by hand allows you to better understand your design, and drawing techniques. And it definitely helps your understanding of the CAD thought process.

Before I started college, I had the same point of view, that CAD was completley superior to hand drafting, and that I would never use hand drafting, but the more I was forced to use it, the more I began to like it. Right now, as far as visual quality, I think hand drafted drawings look much better nicer than CAD drawings. All of the "mess ups" and smudges give the drawings character. And personally, even though I have 4+ years of Inventor and AutoCAD experience through FIRST, I think that hand drafting is 10x easier than drawing on the computer. Everyone who's used any kind of CAD software should know what im talking about here...when your drawing on the computer, especially 3d modeling, crazy stuff can just happen out of know where...

Oh, and your t-square and pencil can't crash, unlike your laptop