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Post by ducatisti on Dec 31, 2008 10:35:05 GMT
Picked this little lot up for £2 in a charity shop www.flickr.com/gp/27565507@N06/47X554Does anybody know anything about the book or the kit (it's all Rotring, so I'm assuming it was decent when it was made)? Is this sort of stuff still made? (I'm thinking about compatibility/buying cartridges etc). Yes I know you could do it all on a CAD package, but that's not the point... |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Dec 31, 2008 11:18:14 GMT
Takes me back a bit!
Yes, Rotring was highly regarded when I was into such things, they produced what I think I would describe as a pen system for technical drawing - able to draw lines of a defined width.
As to whether it's still made/available, I would suggest Google is probably a good friend...
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Post by stanmorek on Dec 31, 2008 11:45:15 GMT
It seems Rotring are still around and have a website running www.rotring.com. I was given a Rotring ink pen and catridge set years ago though I never used it. I've worked with a few old school draughtsmen and was told that ink pens were used on film tracing paper to produce a sort of negative which was copied onto normal paper to give the final drawing. Mistakes on tracing paper had to be scraped off with a scapel. Sometimes the film paper was reused by scraping the entire drawing off. Takes me back too. I did a GCSE in Graphic Communication back in 1990...A mixture of technical drawing and graphic design done on a drawing board. From the recesses of my mind I think third angle projection was a 3 dimensional view mainly used for mechanical components. To draw it you'd start with the 2 dimensional plan and elevations and transfer points into the 3-D view. Drawing a precise curve in third angle was tricky. It looks like you have some 4H lead for very fine lines which would be quite difficult to rub out a mistake especially if you drew by pressing hard on the paper. |
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slugabed
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Post by slugabed on Dec 31, 2008 14:30:57 GMT
Picked this little lot up for £2 in a charity shop www.flickr.com/gp/27565507@N06/47X554Does anybody know anything about the book or the kit (it's all Rotring, so I'm assuming it was decent when it was made)? Is this sort of stuff still made? (I'm thinking about compatibility/buying cartridges etc). You've made a good find! My basic set,with student discount,cost me £11 in 1984!! The numbers on the side are the line thicknesses in millimetres. To refill,you unscrew the transparent cartridge (careful now!) and pour some fresh ink in,out of a bottle with a little spout. They were one of the best drawing pens available/affordable at the time,and a well-crafted drawing beats a computer print-out any time. At architecture school,we used to lightly draw out our designs,on tracing paper,with a 2H pencil,being careful not to press. We'd go over with the rotring,then rub out the pencil construction lines. Any ink mistakes were scratched out with a razor blade,and the shiny surface of the paper restored with a pencil-rubber. If you didn't do this,the ink would soak into the scratched surface and ruin the line of the drawing. If your pens have been used,soak them overnight in water (tepid to start with,it'll cool off) with the ink cartridge removed. When they are clean,you should be able to hear the plunger rattle back and forth when you shake the pen. This plunger keeps the ink flowing when drawing,you invert the pen after each line drawn,and it brings fresh ink into the nib. Give the pens a clean ut at the end of each day's drawing. I wish I'd done all this when I was a student,but skill and patience develope with age! Good luck with the pens! |
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Tom
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Post by Tom on Dec 31, 2008 16:38:27 GMT
Old school rotring stuff is generally quite good - but since they were taken over by Sanford the quality has gone downhill quite a lot. I still use rotring pens at work and now have to keep a small stock of spare nibs in my desk as they can start to bleed ink almost immediately. It looks like you've got some lead for a leadholder (see www.leadholder.com for more about them). You can still get hold of them in graphics shops - though they cost more than the rest of the kit has cost you so far! I've worked with a few old school draughtsmen and was told that ink pens were used on film tracing paper to produce a sort of negative which was copied onto normal paper to give the final drawing. Mistakes on tracing paper had to be scraped off with a scapel. Sometimes the film paper was reused by scraping the entire drawing off. That's more or less what happens - we use the film (or sometimes linen) as the master drawing and take prints from it for issue. Scalpels are now banned though - after someone managed to cut themselves while revising a drawing. |
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Post by ducatisti on Jan 1, 2009 11:34:57 GMT
Oooh, good stuff...
Thanks
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Post by angelislington on Jan 1, 2009 14:34:44 GMT
I've worked with a few old school draughtsmen and was told that ink pens were used on film tracing paper to produce a sort of negative which was copied onto normal paper to give the final drawing. Mistakes on tracing paper had to be scraped off with a scapel. Sometimes the film paper was reused by scraping the entire drawing off. My first job was as a tracer - the engineers would do the initial drawing then give it to the tracers who would literally lay a piece of tracing paper (usually A0 but sometimes A1) over the top and draw it up neat. The traced image would then be fed through a giant ammonia printer, which would shine light through the tracing paper onto paper with a light-sensitive coating, which was then rolled through an ammonia process which would fix the image permanently. This paper version would then be taken to sites and amended. The amendments were then returned to the tracers who would stick it back on the drawing board, place the original traced image over the top, remove the bits on the original - with the scalpel blade - and redraw 'as installed'. Sometimes the traced image got so b0rked through amendment after amendment you could run the paper through the light-ammonia-printer and print it onto film. This image was on the reverse of the sheet (the negative that you mention above). Amendments were then scraped away (out comes the scalpel again) on the back (which is where the printed image was, of course) and fresh amendments drawn on the front. The advantage with tracing paper is that it's a lovely clean surface to draw on, but if you scratched an error away the fibres of the paper were all sticky-up, and you'd have to smooth it down with your fingernail polishing it. After a while, you'd end up going through the actual paper! The advantages of the film were that they were massively more durable, your pens could run across the surface far more easily than on the tracing paper, and the amendments on the front could be rubbed out with an ink eraser (gritty green sticks). But you're not working from the original, so any amendments that were present at the time of printing onto the film meant that the image could be quite 'grubby' or bitty. Sometimes you'd see the ghost of an area from the tracing paper that had been scratched out and reworked. And the ink could sometimes take ages to dry! I was 16/17 when I did this - my first job after I left school in 1988 - three things happened which made me stop doing it: a) the recession [/li][li], b) the introduction of CAD, and c) it's pretty moronic and as the tracers were invariably women and the engineers men, the talk was invariably pretty sexist... still and all, I found it ever so therapeutic to get involved in something which needed such a high degree of precision. [/li][li] I always get a bit thoughtful when people talk about 'the early 90s recession' - as tracing is in the building trade, so to speak, we felt the pinch a lot earlier - maybe 1989. I remember telling friends of mine that a recession was on its way and *no-one* believed me. |
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Post by tubeprune on Jan 2, 2009 9:12:50 GMT
I had a beautiful Rotring set, including the A3 drawing board and lettering sets. I did a complete 5-page set of the Westinghouse brake operation for the old RTC using Rotring. I came across an old copy of it the other day in the museum files. I also did a load of drawings for D Stock when it was brand new.
Of course, it's long gone. Now I do my drawings on a laptop.
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Post by stanmorek on Jan 2, 2009 14:03:52 GMT
I apologise if anyone felt I was inferring some of us as 'old-timers'... ;D
Where I work, with civil and structural drawings it has mostly moved onto CAD though hand drawn sketches can be issued when a job is already on site. I still do a fair bit of hand drawn details which I give to our highly paid CAD techicians to copy onto a drawing. Going back to the old days again, I hear you just had to give them a few pages of calculations and they'd knock up a decent set of drawings. It's meant to be unkind when calling a CAD operator a tracer...
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Tom
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Post by Tom on Jan 3, 2009 20:07:54 GMT
It's meant to be unkind when calling a CAD operator a tracer... Indeed. Some of the older CAD people I worked with often came from a drawing background - one from the Mechanical Design Section and one from Cable Run Design, as I recall. They were the sort who could produce a set of drawings without much supervision - and would find your mistakes as well! However, some of the younger CAD people I've worked with can barely operate the CAD package, let alone understand how a drawing is put together, such that I wouldn't let them loose doing a tracer's job as there is too great a risk of them wasting drawing media.  |
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Post by angelislington on Jan 3, 2009 20:22:19 GMT
Heh - maybe that's the way to get them to learn.
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Post by CSLR on Jan 3, 2009 23:12:42 GMT
When I was still at school, I used to earn a pretty reasonable income producing technical drawings for transport publications. The first ones were drawn with a mapping pen which was a dip-in pen with a thin nib.
I used some of the money that I earned to buy a drafting pen. This was something like a small set of pointed tweezers - the space between the blades acting as an ink reservoir and the distance between the blades being adjusted by a small screw thread to control line width.
From that I moved onto one of the pens that is shown in the upper centre of your picture just below the protractor. This has a bowl reservoir for the ink, with a thin wire connected to the little rod that you can see on the top. Pressing the rod would move a wire down the flow tube beneath the reservoir to keep it clear - a spring then retracted the wire slightly.
The yellow plastic attached to the reservoir was used to connect this pen to the holder and as a visual (colour) indicator of the line width that it produced.
There is a screw hinge part way along the yellow plastic to allow the handle holding angle to be adjusted; the pen having to be kept upright for operation.
As far as I know, this type of pen was designed primarily to work with plastic guide stencils that were used for lettering on drawings, although I used them for producing technical drawings until the Rotrings became available. The problem with these reservoir pens was that they could not be slipped into the pocket in the same way that a Rotring could. I still have a number of drawings that I produced with these things.
The Rotrings made things life much easier and there were a variety of attachments for them, some of which you appear to have.
Somebody mentioned the old linen drawing 'paper'. This was a very fine woven cloth with a semi-transparent glossy coating on both sides that gave it a smooth finish. It was usually a light blue colour and I think that the coating was a type of cellulose. This was used as a drawing material before plastic film came in and was less prone to stretching in humid conditions than cheaper tracing paper. It was also much stronger than paper.
Erasures were either done with an ink rubber or with a type of gritty paste that you rubbed onto the surface to remove the ink by abrasive action.
The disadvantage of making alterations with this material was that, when you rubbed through the coating, the linen became more visible on the dyline or blueprints. Removal of the surface also allowed the fabric to absorb the ink with obvious results.
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