Two weeks ago my boss handed me a set of hand-drawn sketches from 1987 for a retrofit job downtown

I work in an old drafting shop in Pittsburgh and last month we got these yellowed plans for a HVAC duct redesign. The guy who drew them used a Rapidograph pen and didn't label a single dimension. I spent three days trying to trace his logic before I called the original engineer's nephew who still works in town. He told me the old man never used scale rulers, just drew by eye. Has anyone else dealt with old blueprints or hand drawings that made zero sense?

2 comments

2 Comments

morgan9153d ago

Oh man, "drew by eye" is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. I had a similar situation last year with some 1960s plumbing schematics for a church renovation, the guy who drew them apparently just guessed at pipe sizes and wrote "approx" next to every measurement. I spent a full week cross-referencing his sketch against the actual building structure before I realized he'd drawn the whole thing upside down... like the north arrow was pointing south and he just rolled with it. The nephew story rings so true too, old tradesmen had their own weird systems that made sense to nobody else. You have my sympathy on those three days of tracing, I'd have probably thrown the sketches out the window by day two.

blake_cooper3d ago

Hold on, hold on. I'm gonna push back a little here. You lost a week because a 60 year old drawing had an upside down north arrow? That's on you, not the old guy. He drew exactly what he saw, you just assumed the arrow was correct. Old tradesmen didn't have time for fancy drafting courses, they had a job to do and their weird systems worked just fine for them. The nephew probably knew exactly where his uncle's "by eye" stuff pointed, you just weren't in on the secret. Sometimes the problem isn't the sketch, it's the person trying to read it with modern expectations.