Manual Drafting vs CAD
Creating drawings that are both accurate and correctly dimensioned has always been integral to draughtsmanship – whether manual or cad. The biggest difference is that it is easy to change something in CAD whereas with manual drawing it can be a very time intensive task to change drawn details and occasionally it was just the dimension that changed and should be noted NTS.
However it should also be noted that more predesign work was carried out prior to committing the information to a manual drawing because change was not a practical option, whereas today with Cad the design tends to evolve and drawings are changing all the time.
Anyway you should never actually scale from a paper copy of a drawing – either manual or cad.
It occasionally seems to be much easier for me to sketch initially in manual drafting before inputting the measurements in CAD. AutoCAD is excellent (MHO as a novice) in reproducing known elements/dimensions with infinite accuracy, but it’s not user friendly for doodling or sketching.
It’s also very interesting to discover how manual drafting was done in the “good ol’ days’, and thank God CAD has taken much of the work out of drafting! I’d highly recommend the following two 1940s books:
A Manual of Aircraft Drafting
Carl Lars Svensen
D Van Nostrand 1941 and
Airplane Lofting
William Nelson
McGraw-Hill 1941
Alex
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