Engineering drawings

I'm closing off my S50 and thinking about Minnie. I've got a set of 9 A1 drawings - they are clearly vintage - I'd guess probably late 70's

With a usual drawing I'd tape it to the wall and tick stuff off. I think I'd like to make sure these stay nice, they are practically art work in my mind.

Thoughts?

Visit a print shop and run off a few copies, for daily use and file the original. Noel.

For my half size TE I had the original drawings professionally scanned to a disc in pdf and then loaded on a tablet, plus a full set printed and laminated for the shed. Originals safely stored.

Paul.

I will be getting a piece of 6mm ply and a sheet of perspex and take one drawing at a time and sandwich it in between I can then use a white board pen to write on the clear perspex as I need to. That will be easy to wipe of when I need to replace the sheet I am working on to the next one.

If they are old they may well be dyeline and won't stand up well to being exposed to light fort long periods.

Take a series of photos, ideally with a proper camera not a phone, and print them off at A4. I usually take one of the whole sheet as well, just for reference.

Without a proper camera (who's got one these days?), then it will be printshop..

For my traction engine build I did the same as PK. Drawings professionally scanned to disc and originals laminated. Building a Minnie will take time and drawings will get dirty or damaged. The build for my 6" Ruston took 7 years.

If they are scanned to disc, you can print a blow-up of the parts you are working on and pin it to the mill or lathe, adjacent to where you are working or take a copy with you if working elsewhere.

Phone cameras are convenient and take excellent photos but cannot compete with a decent camera which I use for special shots and video. (higher resolution, optical zoom, macro, aperture and shutter speed control, post focus, 4K video, etc)

I am almost with Paul on this.

Take them to your local print shop and get them scanned. They may have to go away if the shop does not have a large enough scanner. The scans can then be kept on your computer and backed-up.

The last time I did this, about half a year ago, the scans came back as .PDF files. I take .jpg scran shots of these and annotate them in Paint. At the moment I use A4 prints, often of just a part of the drawing, but the ideal would to display them on an old computer and monitor in the workshop.

I have photographed drawings in the past and found the results disappointing and hard to use.

JA

Edited By JA on 07/02/2022 09:07:15

Before I post I need to declare an interest as I collect cameras and have nearly 200 film and digital.

Using a digital camera instead of a phone will produce higher resolution images and less distortion than using a phone. I find a camera far easier to hold steady and one is usually nowadays fitted with an optical zoom lens as well as digital zoom as in a phone producing better quality images.

All simple phones and the simpler cameras electronically process the raw image to add colour and to improve the 'snapshot' at the expense of digital fidelity.

A simpler phone camera is not that removed from the 2/6p Box Brownie of the 20s onwards with its single element lens - with the proviso that a typical box camera will have a sensor (ie film) of many tens, if not hundreds of megapixels

Of course we all usually have a phone with us, but for planned picture taking a camera is better IMHO.

Hi, I have scanned a few large format drawings, the largest one is on a paper size of 53" x 31". They where done like this mock up shows.

The scanner is a hp scanjet 4600. I took 10 portrait scans which overlapped each other and four landscape scans, which overlapped each other and the 5 bottom portrait scans. Example of one of the portrait scans below.

When all the scans were done, they were then stitched together to make a full drawing and then cleaned up, this drawing was done in 1947 and is on a paper 40" x 27" and this copy was probably done when the original was getting a bit tiered, hence all they grey between the lines. The photo shows most of the drawing stitched up, but I haven't ever finished it completely and even this still needs some bits cleaning, but it is a time consuming job, others I've done have not needed much cleaning at all.

Regards Nick.

Personally, I have put my drawings up on the metal workshop door with magnets and then used my phone . It isn´t even an expensive phone. I was amazed at the resolution of modern phones. Give it a try before you spend money at the print shop.