How important is Hand Drafting in the workplace?

[apappano]

Teachers: How important is it to your student's skill level to have hand drafting taught before they ever touch a computer? I plan to cover almost the first entire quarter using hand drafting skills exclusively before i move to a computer...

Employers: Does having hand drafting skills make a difference in your shop? why? Does it make you more valuable as an employee? How does it hurt you of you don't have it?

[MrWild]

Hand drafting may be slow and even tedious, but it makes the student aware of how blue prints relate through all four views, Top, front, side, isometric. I'm all for it.

[Bubba]

There are times that one does NOT have a computer available and must do field measurements in order to produce a drawing. If one does not have the manual skills, they often leave out important details that are necessary once you get on the cad machine.
Also, I don't know about others, but the hand skills I learned back in school (we didn't have cad), have stood me in good position to make a cad drawing at times.
At other times, I have had cad only employees that couldn't figure out how to make certain types of drawings as they never had to do it "the hard way"!

On the light side, it makes you appreciate that you no longer have erasure marks (holes in the drawing) or smuges when you plot the final drawing.

[PinMan]

When I went through my apprenticeship, I was required to take Drafting classes before I learned CAD. In the last 10 years, I have had to rely on the skills that I learned in those Drafting classes many times!
Sometimes, in CAD, there can be overlooked things that the software might not pick up. Learning the basics teaches you to pay more attention to what you are drawing and notice the details.

Oh yeah, and those damned smudge marks! lol

[Bubba]

As a followup to Pinman, I was (before retirement) in charge of our "drafting" dept.
We usually hired "graduates" of a tech school and the only "drafting" they got was on cad. This caused many problems as they did not understand many of the basics.

IMO they also lacked many skills that I felt were necessary to be productive "in the real world", but got nowhere when this was presented to the educators! (Nuff said on that subject)

[ger21]

If you don't know how to do hand drafting, imo, you can't be a good draftsman. We have CAD guys that think they are really good, but have no idea what a good draftsman really is. If you take a look at the AutoCAD user forum in the drafting section, you'll see a huge number of threads about young people having very poor drafting skills, mainly because they are not taught. I asked one of our CAD guys if he ever had a hand drafting class. He said he had one, and it was the hardest class he had.

[scottishgrant]

Hand draughing is not only a great way to start before progressing to CAD, but its also a great way of developing pride for what you do.

Its also a great discipline that is valuable in teaching our young generation of engineers. I remember well my teacher shouting at me for drawing huge ROBIN HOOD arows and thick black lines!!!

Hopefully its not a dying art, and it continues to be taught for future generations.

Grant, CNC Programmer (age 28)

[jcoats]

As the industry progresses, knowing how, and doing drafting by hand is still important. My college, that was the ONLY way. In the last few years, learning CAD has been a learning curve for me.

For now, IMHO, hand drafting is still VERY important. In time, as much as we don't want to admit it, hand drafting will be less important as time goes by, but it will be many years before someone doesn't need to do a quick design on the back of a napkin at a coffee shop!

Jack, old computer geek, with mech engr in my background. Age 55+

[daedalus]

why is pencil and paper drafting considered important? Im one of those people who never did drafting, i can't produce good drawings without my cad package, but i still get the job done. In my day to day there are very few times that i can't pull out a laptop and model a part, and in the time it would take me to draw a hand sketch well, i can produce a cad model, show a photorealistic render to someone, and hand off the parts. Personally i find hand sketches to be far less reliable, more likely to be error prone than using a cad package, but thats probably due to my experience.

I see drafting as a skill that takes a lot of time to master, and doesnt really give me anything that i dont get from my cad package already (something i needed to learn to use).

[ger21]

Originally Posted by daedalus why is pencil and paper drafting considered important? Im one of those people who never did drafting, i can't produce good drawings without my cad package, but i still get the job done. In my day to day there are very few times that i can't pull out a laptop and model a part, and in the time it would take me to draw a hand sketch well, i can produce a cad model, show a photorealistic render to someone, and hand off the parts.

I don't think 3D solid modeling is what this topic is about, since you can't do it with a pencil and paper.

I think we're comparing 2D CAD to hand drafting. Most people fluent in 2D CAD, but with no hand drafting experience, will produce very sloppy, and poor quality drawings.

[Bubba]

I have been in the position of having no laptop available in the field and need to make a sketch so I can go back to the "office" to make the cad drawing. There have been times that trying to input the info into cad on a laptop would NOT have been time effective. I make my sketch on a "napkin" or what ever and then go back and input it to cad for the final drawing. Just for reference, my industry (fire protection) mainly relys on 2D drawings as most people in the field cannot read and understand 3D or for that matter isometric type drawings!

Saying that all you need to learn is cad is like saying that you don't need to learn how to add, subtract, multiply, or divide as you have a calculator! It is a basic principle that you need to learn to be able to give the end product to the customer (boss, who ever), that they can read and understand.

For example, an employee (ex) that we had decided that a line of sprinklers looked 'good' in a particular place on the drawing, but he failed to give any dimensions. Guess what, it looked good in cad, but would not fit in space!!!

By the way, I had a hard time passing "drafting" back in the early 60's and still can't produce a great hand drafted drawing, so cad is my mainstay for that. However, a lot of the drawings that I have done in the past 45 years have been done based on the principals of the hand drawing. AND I still use those basic principals for many of the drawings that I still do today.

[ger21]

Originally Posted by Bubba However, a lot of the drawings that I have done in the past 45 years have been done based on the principals of the hand drawing. AND I still use those basic principals for many of the drawings that I still do today.

Correct. Hand drafting teaches you fundamentals that most CAD only trained draftsman just don't seem to have these days. And I work in the construction industry as well, and 2D drawings are the standard.