How important is Hand Drafting?

[apappano]

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...

If you are not a teacher, does having hand drafting skills make a difference in your shop? why? Does it make you more valuable as an employee?

I moved the poll HERE. i need to delete this poll. please go vote over there, but feel free to add opinions here, too.

[cam1]

Hi: I'm surprised by how many "machinists" have a hard time interpreting drwaings. I'd definitely go over the basics:
1. Drawing views,
2. Dimensioning
3. GD&T

They should be able to answer basic questions such as what is the largest permissible diameter etc. when they look at a drawing.

regards

[martinw]

Dear people,

Well, plenty of good ideas have been scribbled on napkins, beer mats and table cloths over exciting meals.

Would the meals have been quite as much fun if the crew brought their laptops. Perhaps the same in Seattle.

Best wishes,
Martin

[Eagle View]

napkins and notepads are great for developing new ideas but when my son pulls out his lap top and fires up Solidworks (been know to happen on the dining room table right after Thanksgiving dinner with his brother and great uncle (retired Aircraft engineer) working with him) Then is when the ideas not only flow but are tested modified and assembled into products that are ready to transfer to my CAM software and machined. It blows me away. He does have a great understanding of manual drafting and material science as well as his ME degree. He is also able to program and machine the parts too. Check out the Detonics DTX pistol www.detonics.ws He designed and built the pistol in an extremely short time, less than a year from idea to functional prototype. He used my shop for the machining, it was a great adventure.

[LeftCoastCNC]

I no longer see the need to know how to do hand drafting with a drafting table. The basics are certainly a necessity, but the days of sitting at a drafting table by the hour is long gone and a waste of every one's time. Hand sketching is still important to communicate on the brainstorming level.

Teaching hand drafting would be like teaching math students how to use a slide rule before a calculator. I am not old enough to have used a slide rule but I am sure there was a transition period where math teachers were teaching the slide rule before the calculator. IMO, We are at the very end of the transition period between hand drafting and CAD. The basics of drafting are needed to use CAD successfully but that is the extend of the drafting knowledge needed.

[Fiddlemaker5224]

I teach violin making to a limited amount of people. I always teach them the hand drafting of the instrument. I am learning the AutoCad but I can still do a violin drawing faster by hand.

[Almaguer]

Originally Posted by apappano I plan to cover almost the first entire quarter using hand drafting skills exclusively before i move to a computer... If you are not a teacher, does having hand drafting skills make a difference in your shop? why? Does it make you more valuable as an employee?

Your plan is a wise choice. I would say its equally important to spend time on manual machines before CNC.

In my shop it doesnt make a difference, work wise. But it sets me apart from the rest of the crew.

[BobWarfield]

I've done more hand drafting than CAD drafting. In fact, I made a living as a draftsman for a short while.

But I can see no advantage to knowing hand drafting in this computer oriented world today. If you learned on the computer, you certainly can sketch on a napkin--that's not really hand drafting. If you learned on a computer, the course should have been set up so you learned how to read the drawings as well.

CAD takes a fair amount of proficiency. I actually think it's a little harder than hand drafting in some respects. I would rather see a student become even more proficient in the tool they will ultimately use than be half proficient in hand and half in CAD.

I think the manual machining point is a little different one, and would strongly recommend manual machining. I say that because there are things of value to be learned there and carried over to CNC that are hard to get any other way. Particularly an understanding of how the machine sounds and feels when it is cutting properly versus when things are off.

Cheers,

BW

[dertsap]

if someone is incapable of creating a drawing by hand then it would be obvious to me that they are also incapable read a drawing by eye , which would make them worthless in my opinion
hand drafting is a bisic skill and everything else built upon , how does someone bypass that and go straight to cad without that basic knowledge , and then have a full understanding of the drawings that they create with the cad system ?

threr is a need for a person who works on the down and dirty floor to be able to do the two minute napkin quick sketch , time is money and most companies don't want to have someone sitting on cad while a machine sits idle

[NC Cams]

WHen I went to college circa 1986, the first class you went to wsa drafiting. WHY? it wa a "weeder" course. It weeded out hhe folks whoul couldn't think 3D in terms of 2D.

A classic drawing quiz involvdes a picture - in the picture are tow boxes next to each other. INsie each box is another box.

The only statement is this" "from the tow given views, project the thrid fiew?.

I"ve yet to see a kid who had solely a cad background answer the question properly. Many a hand dreafter did aw well. It was one of those trick questions that only an old school drafting person would know and charish.

Besides, if I had to go thru mech drafting, why shouldn't everybody??? We first learn to do math on paper, then we learn to use calculators. Pencil drawigns are for whent the power is out and the computer won't run.

I can sitll draw at my drawing table while the hard drive sits dead tue to a crash or poer outage. Not as fast, not as fancy but still as beneficial at conveying design intent.

BTW, the way you printed was used as a judgement of your basic skills. Sloppy printing got you the bott as fast as a sloppy drawing.

A hand drawn drawing says a lot more than some people think - at least when you now HOW to properly evaluate a hand dnoe drawing.

[Bikefarm]

An interesting forum. Everyone' views have a good deal of merit so in the end all you are really going to get is opinion based upon
experience.

My education in the early 80s involved a good deal of tedious drafting which I later came to appreciate as it allows
sketches, not always just done on napkins, to represent your ideas in an accurate way and this is often more spontaneous than
working on a computer. CAD drawings are always much clearer than simply drafted drawings and are therefore much easier to use.

As a recipient of a drawn idea, few of us have control over the format in which the drawing will be sent ,sketch draft or CAD so it is best if we can learn to interpret them all easily and converse by using them all.

It is wise to learn to sketch as a kid then, when your spacial reasoning is ready, to learn the basics of drafting before using and relying on a computer program to do all the calculations for you. As with all things that are easy one pays a price in terms of basic ability, we only need to look at the average ability of people to spell words in their mother tongue after using a computer for some years, to get proof of that.

Of course anything is better than nothing but an all-round ability would no doubt be most desirable.

[Cruiser]

I have the point of view that students should be taught " How to learn !" & " How to use the tools available ". I had some drafting and it helped me learn to layout multi views and relate them. I had many math classes, and went as far as I could. I also really enjoyed science classes. One thing common with any class is learning to use the tools available in order to get it right the first time and prove it ! Point of interest is with Trig, I could never remember the rules of trig to relate the formula's to get what I needed and so struggled sorely. Then one day I ran into the "trig function pocket reference" and I was then able to move on and do my Job to the best of my ability. I will add that in drafting the most important aspect I learned was how to break shapes down to more computable shapes. Even with cad I keep a note pad handy for a quick sketch using rule and pencil, it is an indispensable tool for those who can and will use it. If teachers Learn to teach How to learn and how to find information, and how to use all the tools available. Interest may increase in the students minds and they may go further than they may otherwise ! I had a slide rule, It was banned from the math classes ! I had one of the first calculators, It was banned from math classes ! I had an algebra reference and it was banned from math class. I keep wondering how far I might have gone If !