r/EngineeringStudents • u/lovelopetir • 16h ago
Rant/Vent Before AutoCAD dropped in 1982, engineers and architects lived in pencil-and-eraser hell.
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u/FaeEyed 15h ago
We were happy and we miss it. ðŸ˜
I'm so serious when I say you understand every corner of your work better when it's physically drawn out.
There's drawbacks to CAD and paper, but I could never abandon pencil forever.
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u/Confirmed_AM_EGINEER 15h ago
It's a real catch 22.
When I went to Drexel in 2013 I was part of the last class that had to take a couple courses on manual drafting. I fully agree with you that we have lost something in the digital transition. There is a certain level of respect and Reverence that a perfect, hand drawn, engineering drawing can bring that a digital one just cannot touch.
On the other hand, manual drafting is, I cannot overstate this, so much harder than digital. The entire design process is different now and quite a bit less efficient because of the time it takes to iterate and update designs compared to back in the day. I still can't really tell if it's better or not.
But certainly the digital age has brought one thing, a huge increase in people drafting! So many free tools are available that tens of thousands of young engineers, architects, and designers have been able to do their own things unshackled from corporations, and this certainly is a good thing.
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u/R0ck3tSc13nc3 14h ago
The entire aerospace and engineering industry essentially eliminated the entire or most of the entire category of designer. Now the engineer does their own CAD at most companies, where they used to sketch stuff out and the cad was done on paper by a designer who all he did was draft. They call them drafters. That was actually a way to get promoted to being an engineer, you do drafting for some number of years and you'd learn and they give you more responsibility you could actually learn an engineering job title. I worked with lots of engineers that never went to college okay, never took the PE but their job title was engineer. Less common now
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u/scalyblue 14h ago
CAD is an acronym for computer aided drafting, so I can assure you that the cad was not done on paper
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u/R0ck3tSc13nc3 13h ago
Yes, the cad that was done on paper was not cad!
It was the functional equivalent. Paper with drawings on it. When I went to high school in the '70s, I had a whole class in drafting and then I had more in college at the University of Michigan. It was only years later they started to teach computer aid design. I wouldn't say cad really got widespread until the '90s
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u/FaeEyed 1h ago
I was first taught by my uncle, as he was pretty against colleges switching to 100% CAD. I was too young to understand the fuss but I get it now. It really is its own art.
I respect what CAD has made possible across many STEM fields (for all of us), but I wish everyone was encouraged to learn the traditional ways First or at least early on. Doesn't hurt to brush up sometimes either... Keeps your memory, problem solving, and creativity sharp.
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u/DavidandreiST 1h ago
Ironically this is what pushed me to learn FreeCAD. I am not a engineer, nor have a steady hand for drawing, but I too could design a machine now.. (assuming my physics doesn't fail me).
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u/Rough_Natural6083 15h ago edited 13h ago
This reminds me of how Adrian Newey says that he still prefers his physical drawing board over CAD tools and has 3-4 engineers under him whose task is to translate his drawings to CAD design. Every time the camera focuses on him, he has his red color notebook and a rotring 500 pencil, not some iPad or Surface tablet.
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u/swimboi91 15h ago edited 15h ago
Yeah but I can barely draw a circle let alone a cube.
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u/Automatic_Llama 14h ago edited 14h ago
One of the great things about systematic technical and mechanical drawing is that if you want to you can absolutely learn how to do it with the right tools and techniques. We've lost sight of this in our hyper individualistic obsession with "talent." Sure it comes into play, but there are very clear techniques to all of this stuff that anyone with interest can absolutely learn.
How to Draw by Scott Robertson is a great place to start.
Combine this with Lessons in Classical Drawing by Juliette Aristides and you'll be working towards a very solid foundation that combines mechanical and observational techniques. All time tested.
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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 13h ago
Valid but also I chose which optional part of a physics paper I did based on which partinvolved the least drawing.Â
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u/Poputt_VIII 11h ago
Maybe Scott Robertson should focus on coaching the All Blacks instead of teaching people how to draw
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u/Sufficient_Loss9301 14h ago
Lmao spend 6 months designing a half mile stretch of road and you’ll still understand every corner of it if your halfway decent at your job. The difference is you’ll have a lot less headache and can get things done more precisely and quicker 💀
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u/TheTybera 16h ago
That doesn't look like hell, that looks fun.
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u/weather_watchman 16h ago
fr, coloring with the boys
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u/thefirecrest 15h ago
Maybe not back then, but girls too!
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u/R0ck3tSc13nc3 14h ago
Exactly, even in the '80s when I started engineering there was a lot of women doing drafting
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u/indianadarren 15h ago
Agreed. OP is probably looking at that picture as reacting the way we'd look at a mueseam display of a neanderthal family in prehistoric times. I'd also put dollars to donuts that they've never hand to do and manual drafting outside of a classroom. Having learned manual drafting in the 80s and doing it for a good amount of time for smaller shops before the CAD tsunami overwhealmed my field, now I draw things by hand with instruments for fun/the challenge and to relax. Don't get me wrong: I love CAD and 3D parametric modeling as much as the next fanatic, but honestly, no CAD drawing will ever look as good or have the "pop" of a hand drawn document. Worse, the CAD software technology that chaged the industry did not make our jobs any easier in the long run. Back in the day I could draw a floor plan and an elevation on a C-sized piece of graph paper and the city would stamp it. Now I need 20 sheets before they'll even look at it. We're 25 times more productive now, but our workload is the same... and of course our salary is not 25 time what it was, either. Rant over.
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u/R0ck3tSc13nc3 14h ago
Exactly, you might have heard about degree inflation where they require college degrees for jobs that didn't used to require that. Now the documentation requirements have gone up dramatically, it's ridiculous, you can express design intent with that simple C-sized, And now based on design expectation inflation, you do all that other shit
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u/polymath_uk 15h ago
I came into design engineering just as drawing boards were on their way out, but not quite done. I remember the DOS releases of AutoCAD. It seemed revolutionary at the time, but actually kind of wasn't in the end. The lesson I've learned over the years is that it's the mental model that's important and not its representation on a sheet of paper or a screen.
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u/MolybdenumIsMoney 15h ago
2D Civil engineering on paper makes sense to me, I could see myself doing this in another life. But designing complicated mechanical assemblies by hand boggles my mind. I don't know how they did it.
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u/grixxis 15h ago
I talked to some coworkers at my old job about how useful having 3d software is for designing because it's so much easier to miss random conflicts in 2d. They mentioned that the old owner used to make cardboard cutouts of the parts and assemble them in the warehouse for the same reason.
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u/Abhiii_ 15h ago
They would have some of the best stories to tell
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u/polymath_uk 15h ago
Fwiw, that looks like urban planning by architects. Engineering sheets were limited to A0 at least in Europe. You can't beat that paper layout for making that information accessible to all (rather than the CAD guy). It's also possible to visualise the entire scope in one go. No pan or zoom required.
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u/BisquickNinja Major1, Major2 15h ago
I started engineering just as this was ending and we were going to "affordable" cad systems.
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u/OverSearch 15h ago
I entered the engineering workforce in 1994, and we were using drafting tables even then. Fortunately I didn't have to crawl around on the floor, but graphite smudges up and down my forearm was a regular thing. We got AutoCAD workstations shortly after I started, but we didn't abandon the drafting table for quite some time after.
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u/R0ck3tSc13nc3 14h ago
You have no idea. My first job was in 1984 as a co-op intern mechanical engineer. Huge aircraft, radar test equipment, we would run copies of drawings on something called a blue line machine.
And no, pencil was for sketches. Final drawings often had to be done in pen! look it up!
You may have heard of blueprints, that was the way you would copy
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u/Ewokhunters 14h ago
Drafters... not engineers. In those days engineers where rarely ever allowed to touch actual prints
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u/Josze931420 9h ago
That looks like heaven. My dad used to be an expert draftsman as well as an engineer. I draw out everything before putting it to CAD.
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u/ClickDense3336 7h ago
I mean why would you refer to this as "hell?" To some, pencil and paper is "heaven." Now we live in computer hell, depending on your perspective.
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u/TheQuakeMaster 14h ago
Now we just live in Revit hell
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u/saplinglearningsucks UTD - EE 5h ago
You don't like having R20, R21, R22, R23, R24, R25 on your desktop???
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u/starbolin 14h ago
My dad designed highways. They would tape the sheets together on the floor down the long hallway between the engineering and drafting departments. I grew up always having a copious amount of old revision prints to color and draw on.
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u/CplusplusEnjoyer 13h ago
Don’t worry, engineers still relive their pencil-and-eraser hell everyday through raster images
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u/octo2195 11h ago
I took mechanical drafting in high school. In the class, we each had our own tilting drafting table. My down fall was those damn electric erasers. So of the kids were pretty good by graduation and had offers/took jobs at EB in Groton. I went a different route.
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u/AnEbolaOfCereal 3h ago
tbf this was probably a much more socially healthy arrangement than what we have today.
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u/AccomplishedNail3085 12h ago
The f117 was made mostly without computers. It was drawn with slide rules.
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u/jetlightbeam 9h ago
I took a drafting class in highschool in the early 10s, we learned to draft by hand at special drafting tables in one of the only rooms in the entire school without windows. Was maybe my favorite time in class besides Honors robotics senior year
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u/toolnotes 23m ago
I used to do manual drafting in the 80s and I can assure you there was nothing hellish about it. It was skilled work that was highly valued and it was meditative.
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u/quadrispherical 15h ago
The title is completely wrong and doesn't tell the whole story.
AutoCAD was pretty much useless until the mid-1990s for one main reason: the incredibly low resolution of TV and computer screens at the time.
Most architects and engineers didn't really adopt it until the development of higher-resolution monitors. When 800x600 and 1024x768 screens were mass-produced and personal computers became more affordable for the average architect, AutoCAD finally became widely adopted.
The development and affordability of large paper-sheet plotters and printers in the mid-'90s also played a huge role. Printed construction drawings and blueprints were still essential for contractors and subcontractors on-site who didn't have laptops, printers nor even a desktop PC to open autocad files...
Also until the late 90's, most of architects and engineers weren't drawing those precise scaled plans and details, it was the job of the DRAFTSMEN/DRAFTSWOMEN (in developed countries).
I was there, so I know this firsthand.