[Birdhunter1]

I had some drafting classes in high school that we had to do that kind of stuff, in my metals shop classes we had to do them to. In college we had to do them often and as a sheetmetal worker we had to that once in a while but mainly a sketch with dimensions sufficed. It helps alot to be able to draw every dimension of it, my drafting instructor in high school once told me that if it can't be drawn it can't be built. Visualizing it in your mind helps alot when building it.

 

[Birdhunter1]

Last night I was laying out a plate I am needing to make. What it is is an adapter to make wheel weights fit a bigger wheel than the holes in the weight are laid out for. There are three holes in the rims spaced evenly.. so an equilateral triangle. I needed to find the radius of a circle hitting those three points. CAD would have been easy but any button pusher with no skills could have done that, instead I laid the triangle out on 1/4" plate, took my dividers and made arcs from each point then used a straight edge to find the radius, then used my dividers again to draw the circle I was needing to find. The hardest part was laying the triangle out because it had to be exact, after that it was a piece of cake. A computer program would have taken 5 minutes for the computer to load, then another 2-3 for the program to load then 2-3 minutes doing the work to only later have to go back to the steel plate and lay it all out again.

 

[Birdhunter1]

I know the architecture program at the University I work at doesn't even get into CAD with it's students till at least the second semester, all freshmen students learn to draw it out first before they ever get to look at a computer screen.