Drafting linen

[SmithDoor]

This post #3
I hope help

Installing program per 2001 (most older program be for 2001 used a 16 bit installer this will install older programs)


For installing copy all files to hard-drive
Use to install on 64 bit windows SETUP.EXE see files below . for installing AutoCad 95LT, AutoCad 2000LT and Plotupdate2000 (print drive only for AutoCad 2000LT)


AutoCad 95 may show error but still works after installing


AutoCad LT 2000 does not copy all files just copy all files from CD that did not copy the first time installing.




Set Compatabilty to Windows 95 to Windows ME be for installing

For floppy information need need for AutoCad 95LT I copy this AutoCAD 95 floppy folder on the hard-drive and I may a CD most computers today do not have a floppy drive I have one that pugs into a USB port from Amazon.

After Installing AutoCAD LT 2000 some files do not copy , Just copy the files not in AutoCAD LT 2000 files most are dll files

************ NOTE: Set Compatabilty to Windows 95 to Windows ME some time later versions for Is3 and Is5 intallers **********

**** Newer version of windows 10 v1903 and late the PDF printer do not work right just install a PDF printer for internet for works great ***

My recollection of Linen is as a metal work apprentice in the Midland Junction workshops for the railways,1950.
The linen was rolled out on to the board and securely held down. I would have thought glossy side up but memory fades. The sheet was "sized" with a "pomme" filled with very fine chalk.
Apprentices always were very vigorous applying the chalk to ensure that the linen and nearby draftsmen received a liberal coating.
At a later date the compliment was returned with the fake ink blot and upturned indian ink bottle. All to the amusement of the office staff and chagrin of the recipient.
The drawing boards were of a large size set on a bench at above waist height. This meant standing to use them or perching on a bar stool to sit.
At the end of the day boards were covered with a cloth, not sure why.
Drawing instruments were German "Staedtler", I still have mine,,,,,,,,,,,,somewhere.
Drawing mistakes were made and these were removed with judicial use of a very sharp razor blade or scalpel.
later in industry drawing film replaced linen and pencil replaced ink. Time dictated drawing accuracy and freehand replaced compasses.
Enter CAD and that's progress.

Mago

 

[rickhann]

This has brought back a few memories from when I was a drafting cadet around 1964. One of the tasks for the cadets was to update existing drawings with modifications. At that time we were making changes to an old power station built around 1920 or so and all of the drawings were done on linen. Drawing was on the mat side and pounce power was drawing chalk power which was puffed onto the linen when applying ink using a pen and ink. The powder made the ink flow particularly after making modifications.

The old draftsmen were artists and they all had there own style and their drawings were very accurate. They also used a lot of colour to identify different sections.

To print them, we had an original 3 part chemical dye line printer which produced what was called blue prints which were blue lines on white paper. Using colour produced different shades of blue.

I believe the original power station drawings were given to the State museum here in Western Australia when the drawing office went digital.

I had long moved on by then having completed University but it does bring back a memory or two.

Bruce W-S

I guess I am being picky, but my recollection was that blue lines on white background were called "Blue Line" prints. "Blue Prints" were white lines on a blue background. I think blue prints were the predecessor to blue line prints.
Rick

 

[ALEX1952]

I apologize for going off topic slightly, I started my apprenticeship at CAV's (lucas) which occupied the old Shorts seaplane works, I had a job that required ally sheet and was told to go and get some from the "tunnels" which were used as storage ( napolionic tunnels connecting the river with forts some miles away) anyway I found complete sheets of ally painted on one side in white with the drawings full size of parts and assembly's for the Sunderland flying boat. At the time they were creating the RAF museum at Hendon and I asked for them to be donated which was denied by the blinkered powers that be, and are now all gone which is a tragedy. I don't no why they were on ally perhaps because of fire as it was wartime or maybe durability.

 

[Brian Hutchings]

Very sorry to hear about that Alex.
The sheets of aluminium were called lofts at Rolls-Royce Aero and were used to print full sized shapes of complex component shapes. The shapes could then be cut out and used as templates to check contours.
The word 'lofts' comes from the practice of old shipbuilders drawing out full sized shapes on the largest area available which was the sail loft.
Brian

 

[LorenOtto]

I guess I am being picky, but my recollection was that blue lines on white background were called "Blue Line" prints. "Blue Prints" were white lines on a blue background. I think blue prints were the predecessor to blue line prints.
Rick

You are correct, but generally people refer to most drawings as "blue Prints" no matter what the medium. My experience started at Douglas Aircraft in 1965 as a draftsman using pencil on vellum and progressed to pencil on mylar prior to the company using cad drawings in the late 60's.

 

[stevehigg]

Does anyone know where you can purchase Drafting Linen(Cloth)?

I have most of a full roll at home in a cupboard, I picked it up in the late 80's after cleaning out an old drafting office. Its Alliance Brand Tracing Cloth British made Hall and Harding

 

[stevehigg]

Does anyone know where you can purchase Drafting Linen(Cloth)?

I have most of a roll. I took a few feet off to look at it and washed the wax off to see the cloth. Its a 20yrd x 32' Alliance Brand Tracing Cloth British Made by Hall Harding. I pick it up after cleaning out an old drafting office I work at in the late 80's. New Zealand

 

[SmithDoor]

Drafting linen just did not work for blue prints.

When need lay paper I used white paper that came on 36" roll from school supply. It was very durable over drafting paper.

Dave

I have most of a roll. I took a few feet off to look at it and washed the wax off to see the cloth. Its a 20yrd x 32' Alliance Brand Tracing Cloth British Made by Hall Harding. I pick it up after cleaning out an old drafting office I work at in the late 80's. New Zealand

 

[stevehigg]

I have most of a roll. I took a few feet off to look at it and washed the wax off to see the cloth. Its a 20yrd x 32' Alliance Brand Tracing Cloth British Made by Hall Harding. I pick it up after cleaning out an old drafting office I work at in the late 80's. New Zealand

dunno what it’s worth but I won’t use it. I also have the ink pens with nibs they used on this paper Graphos set and nibs

 

[SmithDoor]

At the end I was ball point pens.
Even found ball point to fit my Leroy lettering set.

I do not mis ink sets

Dave

dunno what it’s worth but I won’t use it. I also have the ink pens with nibs they used on this paper Graphos set and nibs

 

[nel2lar]

There are so many things I miss about the way we made things happen years ago. A young lady that work with the company I spent most of my career at did all the certificates with all that stylish writing . She did some amazing work and it looked so good.
Thanks for the memories.
Nelson

 

[comstock-friend]

When Lockheed bailed out of Burbank, my Dad went dumpster diving and saved around 20 P-38 inked linen and pencil on vellum drawings. Unless they were adapt at writing backwards, the ink is on the gloss side!

John

 

[bgillen]

Does anyone know where you can purchase Drafting Linen(Cloth)?

I found an unopened roll of linen in my architectural storeroom. Let me know if you want it. Bill gillen 413 374 5193

 

[dawilson2]

Back in my young days as a civil engineer, I often worked with plan sheets drafted with ink on linen (starched). That was over 50 years ago before mylar took over. The linen had a glossy side and a matte finish side. I cannot for the life of me remember which side was used for the drawing ink. Intuitively I would think the matte side, but I remember preparing the surface prior to inking by rubbing it with pounce to take the sheen off. Does anyone know which side is used for the inking? Rick

The matte finish side.

 

[Unctarheel77]

I found an unopened roll of linen in my architectural storeroom. Let me know if you want it. Bill gillen 413 374 5193

I

Does anyone know where you can purchase Drafting Linen(Cloth)?

I’ve got a partial roll of drafting linen should anyone want it.

 

[GreenTwin]

When I started working in 1985, we all had drafting tables, and generally you stood at the table and made drawings all day long.
We did have a chair, but seldom sat down.

In the beginning it was mostly pencil on vellum.
Vellum is what they call linen paper.

We also did some Indian ink on vellum, but I was never aware of any difference in the sides of vellum.
I guess I always used the outside of the roll, whatever that was.

Then mylar came along, with plastic lead.
Then slicks. Those were a nightmare to try and keep track of all the layers.
Slicks were the mechanical version of layers in a CAD program.

We always printed in blueline, using an ammonia machine.
Sometimes we had to read old blueprints, which were the white lines on a blue background, and they were far more difficult to read (for me) than blue lines on a white background.

CAD came along about the time the IBM PC came out, and when the IBM AT came along, CAD work at my company started in earnest.

The first plotters were pen plotters, and the pen always dried out at the end and ruined a 1 hour plot.

There were multiple CAD programs, and different firms used different programs.
My company finally settled on AutoCad, which was good just from the standpoint of not having to know three or four different programs.

In 1985, we had a mainframe with about six dumb terminals, and it ran FORTRAN.
I learned FORTRAN on punch card.
I still have my FORTRAN compiler somewhere.
That was/is a great program.
"FORTRAN is dead" they say, but I say "Long Live FORTRAN".

I still have a set of pencil drawings on vellum I made in a drawing class in school, and they still look like the day I made them.
Vellum does not seem to degrade if you keep it dry.
Vellum will absorb moisture, so you have to watch for that, since it can change dimensions.
Mylar is good in that it is not affected by moisture.

I have a couple of rolls of vellum, and I still have clients who want final drawings printed on mylar, so I have mylar too.

Modern plotters (the ones I use) are ink jet, but they have laser plotters too.
I prefer the ink jet plotters since they seem to hold up better.

Things have changes a lot since I started working.

I still use AutoCad 2004, and I will die using that.
I refuse to upgrade to any other program.

.

 

[Richard Hed]

When I started working in 1985, we all had drafting tables, and generally you stood at the table and made drawings all day long.
We did have a chair, but seldom sat down.

In the beginning it was mostly pencil on vellum.
Vellum is what they call linen paper.

We also did some Indian ink on vellum, but I was never aware of any difference in the sides of vellum.
I guess I always used the outside of the roll, whatever that was.

Then mylar came along, with plastic lead.
Then slicks. Those were a nightmare to try and keep track of all the layers.
Slicks were the mechanical version of layers in a CAD program.

We always printed in blueline, using an ammonia machine.
Sometimes we had to read old blueprints, which were the white lines on a blue background, and they were far more difficult to read (for me) than blue lines on a white background.

CAD came along about the time the IBM PC came out, and when the IBM AT came along, CAD work at my company started in earnest.

The first plotters were pen plotters, and the pen always dried out at the end and ruined a 1 hour plot.

There were multiple CAD programs, and different firms used different programs.
My company finally settled on AutoCad, which was good just from the standpoint of not having to know three or four different programs.

In 1985, we had a mainframe with about six dumb terminals, and it ran FORTRAN.
I learned FORTRAN on punch card.
I still have my FORTRAN compiler somewhere.
That was/is a great program.
"FORTRAN is dead" they say, but I say "Long Live FORTRAN".

I still have a set of pencil drawings on vellum I made in a drawing class in school, and they still look like the day I made them.
Vellum does not seem to degrade if you keep it dry.
Vellum will absorb moisture, so you have to watch for that, since it can change dimensions.
Mylar is good in that it is not affected by moisture.

I have a couple of rolls of vellum, and I still have clients who want final drawings printed on mylar, so I have mylar too.

Modern plotters (the ones I use) are ink jet, but they have laser plotters too.
I prefer the ink jet plotters since they seem to hold up better.

Things have changes a lot since I started working.

I still use AutoCad 2004, and I will die using that.
I refuse to upgrade to any other program.

.

Ooooh, I have AutoCAD 2004 too. It is very powerful but I now use Alibre Atom, almost exclusively.

 

[GreenTwin]

The slick system was a good idea in theory, but the use of that system was problematic.

It was quite expensive to replace everyone's slicks every time the architects changed the floorplan.
The punched holes had to be exactly lined up with every reprint/version.

Printing from slicks was a nightmare, and the more layers you had, the more difficult and time consuming it was to make a print.
We had a huge flat bed printing machine for slicks, with a vacuum pump.
The procedure was to open up the glass front, build up the layers according to a chart, depending on which discipline you wanted to print, close the front, pull a vacuum in order to compress the slicks against the top mylar sheet, rotate the entire bed 180 degrees, and then press the start button.
The UV lights would come on, and the bed would lower down to be near the lights at the bottom of the machine.

One day the sensors got out of wack, and the bed powered itself into the lamps, shattering them with several loud booms.
Getting the machine serviced and repaired was costly and time consuming.

We did not use the slick system for very long.

And storing all the slicks and mylars was a nightmare, and without the reassembly list, it was hit and miss as to whether you could ever get the right combination for a print later.

Sometimes we resorted to correcting the slicks, if the changes were minor.
You could erase the back of them, and draw on the front of them with a permanent sharpy-type fine point pen.

Slicks were a great idea, and horrible to use.

The new CAD systems and pen plotters were somewhat of a nightmare to use for many years.
The programs were extremely buggy, and would often crash without warning.
The CAD programs were very very slow, and a regen could take 30 minutes or more.

The drafting folks who did all of our manual drawings were very good at what they did, and produced beautiful hand drawings.
The folks that did the initial CAD work on computers had no idea how to make CAD drawings look like hand-drawn drawings, and no idea how to correctly use line weight, linetypes, scale factors, etc.

And then paperspace came along, and that created endless nightmares of things drawn outside the viewport.
When I got out of corporate, I outlawed paperspace, and never used it again (except on a few airport runway projects).
I use XCLIP exclusively these days (since 2003), and that completely eliminates viewport problems, and greatly simplifies a drawing, giving a "what you see is what you get" drawing.

AutoCad 2004 was the first version that I recall being stable most of the time.

.

 

[ChazzC]

I

I’ve got a partial roll of drafting linen should anyone want it.

Haven't worked (or seen) linen since high school (late 60's): we used it for inking only, drafting was done on heavy-weight smooth paper.

 

[terryd]

Back in my young days as a civil engineer, I often worked with plan sheets drafted with ink on linen (starched). That was over 50 years ago before mylar took over. The linen had a glossy side and a matte finish side. I cannot for the life of me remember which side was used for the drawing ink. Intuitively I would think the matte side, but I remember preparing the surface prior to inking by rubbing it with pounce to take the sheen off. Does anyone know which side is used for the inking? Rick

Hi,
You mention 'pounce' is that similar to ground pumice that we used in our drawing office in the UK. The system in our drawing office in the 1960s was that the draghtsmen provided the general arrangement and detail drawings on paper with pencil for ease of correction. The drawings would then be checked by the design engineer for accuracy and any modifications made if needed. These drawings would then be sent to the Tracers, mostly women and girls worked in the tracing section, who used indian ink on starched linen to trace important drawings from which prints were made without deterioration which could then be stored for future projects (most of our work was producing large bespoke conveyor systems for industry, mines, unloading certain cargos at docks etc).

We also moved over to mylar film, it was supposed to be superior but I could never get the finesse of linework that I could get on paper with pencils. The tracers did a superb job and those permanent indian ink on linen were used for making prints for use on the shop floor or on site.As you say the indian ink could easily be scraped off with a razor blade for modifications needed for a new, similar job. But for best work, that 'master' would then be traced. Those girls were quick and accurate in their work - they were impressive. If you spoke to them nicely and smiled they would smuggle you a good size sample which I then washed out the starch leaving a good heavy linen which when damp made pressing trouser creases a breeze as we did in those more formal days.dd

We never called it 'vellum' just linen. Real vellum is made from part of an animal skin. Used for important documents such as government rules, laws and regulations as it was very robust and could withstand much handling when 'Steet Criers' travelled around reading out the latest scrolls; and books (mostly bibles). As far as I know it was used from the early medieval period, perhaps earlier hence the good condition of the wonderful medieval illustrated bibles for example. The scribes who were the literate ones made their own inks and some had secret recipes. If the material was made from calfskin which produced a superior product, very fine and flexible it was a form of vellum called parchment which would be used for the special bibles in larger churches cathedrals and for the king, Jouneyman priests would carry a vellum bible. There are modern developments in paper which are called 'paper vellu' often sold as just vellum but it is not the real thing.

TerryD