I Hate Drawings!!! 12

[Bester2]

I need to rant. Why do we have drawings in the 3-D world? I am so tired of arguing about the line thickness/ the font size/ the angle of the leader line or all of the other BS that goes along with creating drawings. Then you issue a fabrication to someone and they inevitably call me back asking how does this thing go together. Then I send a packaged assembly to them and there is no more questions. All they needed in the first place was the model with the associated material. Weld callouts can be called out as annotations, for that matter they should just be physically modeled. And when it comes to assembly, the model is the easiest way to show how things come together. Today you can even create video clips that can be animated with notes to show how things come together. I worked for a company once where I heard that an entire division was designed paperless. In order to do this they made all of their suppliers run the same CAD package. This allowed them to created annotations in the models along with associated views to make the parts. Do places like this really exist? If so dose anyone else see this becoming this way in the future. Dose anyone else agree with me that drawings are a waste of time? Does anyone think that their mechanical task is better served in a two dimensional world? Am I doomed to suffer in a world of arbitrary existence??

One extremely frustrated engineer that is probably looking for a new career!!!


SW 2007 SP 5.0

 

[drawoh]

ewh,

I used to draw a lot, and I took art in high school. Being able to draw largely means knowing what stuff looks like.

Quite a few years ago, I was asked to design a poster for a friend who was involved with a Fringe theatre festival. I needed to draw some forest animals sitting around a park sign. I was okay with racoons, but I had no clue of how to draw a deer. I know a deer when I see one, but I did not understand the little details of where the ears and antlers go, and how the head is shaped. I wound up going to the library to look at pictures. This was prior to the internet.

Being able to free-hand draw has not helped me much as a designer because most of my design problems consist of fitting things into available space. I need scale models, in 2D or 3D.

I do not understand how someone, lacking 3D visualization skills, can do good mechanical design. Building a 3D[ ]model is not a random process. You have to have some vision of how you are going to solve the problem.

My printing has gone way downhill since my drafting board days. My cursive has never been very readable.

JHG

 

[ewh]

I agree that freehand drawing is not helpful in making a good engineering drawing, or model for that matter. It is valuable in sharing concepts as they occur though. At least that is how I would value it.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. - [small]Thomas Jefferson [/small]

 

[btrueblood]

Most of the good ideas around our office start as white-board sketches, or pencil and paper sketches. Sometimes napkin and paper sketches, at our sadly too-infrequent pub meetings. Only later do they get refined as 3D models and 2D CAD drawings.

Most helpful to me over the years were the lessons on drawing projected views and iso sketching that were taught in an Engineering Drafting course (done with pencils and two triangles). I still amaze junior CAD wizards with my ability to find the "true" view of complicated junctions, or generate a cut template for a pipe saddle from 2D drawings. It can be handy, even with 3D modelling, to be able to figure out the right projection angle ("viewpoint") for certain details.

 

[ctopher]

I started with the same lessons, 9th thru 12th grades...then college and employers.
Three years after HS I started 3D modeling (computing, not GQ ).

Chris
SolidWorks/PDMWorks 08 3.1
AutoCAD 08
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