31 replies to this topic

[A. J. Hoyt]

I still have a drafting board with a parallel slide bar I engineered myself using embedded ball bearing slot car front wheels to guide the cable as it crosses itself through the slide bar. I used a fine, fine piece of wood for the table and covered it with what was a very new product at the time, self-healing plastic covers (compass holes would never leave any kind of visible mark!).

 

I made it to create my senior project in high school, a full set of working drawings of a home residence of original design. I did it with ink on Mylar. Old time drafters will recognize that the parallel slide bar is the next best thing to a drafting machine and what a pain in the rear it is to do ink but that is what reproduced best on the ammonia developed blueprints. Yes, I am really dating myself here.

 

Also, the coolest slide rule I ever saw was a model that was circular - the inner and outer scales were stationary and the inner scale rotated all the way around - that way, you would never run that middle scale out the end! I wish I had asked the engineer for that piece when he retired, just for it's coolness factor.

 

Back to Dan Gurney's cool engine concept! I met Dan as part of the sales team that sold his All American Racers multiple seats of Unigraphics CAD/CAM software back when he was transitioning from the Japanese designed Toyota GTP to the John Ward designed all-conquering Santa Ana, CA built Eagle driven by Juan Manuel Fangio II, among others. THOSE were the days!

 

Enough of my contribution to the thread drift...

[beardogracing]

The first drawing is not called drafting. It's called technical illustration. I spent a year at college learning how to do this tedious craft.
 
Then I was forcibly transfered to Graphic Design (they didn't like hippies in technical illustration), so I became an ad agency creative director.
 
Technical illustration? It was one of the first things the geeks invented programs for on the Mac. So if I had done that I'd have been unemployed in 10 years. I don't think anybody does tech Illustration with ink and pen now-a-days.

[Mike Patterson]

Chris, you are correct, the first drawing is a technical illustration, and the second is a section view along an unknown line. And they were both probably done on a computer, but it looks like ink on mylar. I love it. I wish I had a dollar for every jewel-tip Rapidograph® point I wore out. I'm glad my employer paid for them!

[Jay Guard]

...When I graduated Engineering school in '72, we were the last class of slide rule engineers.

 

I graduated with a degree in Mech. Engineering in 1976 and I used a slide rule well into '73 because I couldn't afford the $400 for a HP.  But when the Texas Instruments SR-50 came out for only $100 the world (or at least all of the tests) changed overnight.

 

BTW... I've still got my T-square and drafting tools from six years of drafting (Jr High-High School) and of course my K&E drafting machine as well as my trusty slide rule. I think I've even got one of those circular slide rules AJ mentioned which I don't think I ever really liked.

 

Sorry for the nostalgic thread drift but I just couldn't resist talking a walk down memory lane!

[Half Fast]

That $400 HP tranlates to over $2,000 in today's money. $400 would have paid a nice chunk of tuition in those days.

 

Cheers,

 

PS: Tests before calculators were based on "slide rule accuracy".

[beardogracing]

I still have my T-square, six set squares, three steel pica rulers, four steel metric rulers, two steel inch rulers, 150 old style majic markers, three compass sets, dividers, 10 Pentels, etc., etc., all used for work and gained from four ad agencies who went out of business on me, but all these tools are great for building slot cars... oh and an airbrush, a loupe, etc. 

 

I still find these tools come in handy for designing my Beardog chassis, I draw them up the old-fashioned way, then let the expert convert them to a CAD program.

[Randy Tragni]

Until a working engine is built the jury is out on this engine but, I can see the potential for huge amounts of parasitic frictional losses in all those gears (kind of like an H-16 BRM).

Like the Deltawing car, this may be an idea whose time may never come.