In praise of Fender schematics

[Enzo]

Oh yeah, we had little wooden handles with a strip of sand paper glued to it for that, but we had the whirly things too. We had rules I now forget, like #2 pencil for outlines, and #4 for lettering or some such. I know I had pencils up to #6. I remember rotate the pencil.

And we had to put a strip of masking tape - well, really the less sticking draftsman tape - on the underside of our striaghtedges and triangles and templates. That lifted it off the paper a little bit to prevent ink from wicking under and spreading out on the paper. To this day when I draw in ink against a ruler, I often slip a piece of card stock under the ruler. I am sure it is not necessary with a common drawing pen of today, but old ideas linger on.

I haven't drawn up anything in a long long time, but I did go so far as to build myself a light table in my office. My wood drawing board I think eventually made its way to the kitchen, where it helped us make bread for quite a while. I mean the kind you make toast from, not the bread in a paycheck.

There is a lot of nuance, skill, craftsmanship to this drawing thing, way more than I ever had.


Odd you should mention Lawrence Welk. Just a couple days ago a lady dropped off her mixer. She plays accordion, and I mentioned Myron Floren, and she perked up, "Oh, he's a friend of mine."

[raiken]

I love it when us old farts get a chance to reminisce and tell war stories.

Back when I got out of college and got my first engineering job designing broadcast video equipment, (mostly all analog), we drew all our schematics by hand, on great big D size sheets, and sent them to document control for blueline copies - those machines would stink up the whole place with ammonia smells!

We did PC board layouts with rubylith tape and sent out the films for processing the boards. Most were two-layer, a four-layer was a true luxury!

We had no computers until the first IBM PC came out. I only got one after a more senior engineer moved up to an AT and I got his old PC.

We eventually got a Telesis machine to do computer pc layouts - it looked like a big arcade game with two displays built into it, one vertical and one on the desktop, and a light-pen that beeped every time you touched the screen to place a component. We got Futurenet Dash-2 schematic drawing software to replace the hand-drawing. We were big-time!

Ah, the good ol' days...thank God they're gone!

Randall Aiken

[Prairie Dawg]

When I worked for Garrett I was next to the document control room with the Bruning Revolute machine, which was a 5 foot wide one. It was the undisputed territory of Loretta and Bessie. Monday mornings the engineers were in there huffing ammonia to clear their heads while the mechanics were out in the hangar breathing the customers' oxygen. We did the bluelines and also Printecs on plastic film. Every engineer and designer had an electric eraser and pencil pointer.

Since my job was weight and balance estimates I had control of the Digital Calculator which was a Burroughs with Nixie tube display that replaced a ten key. It was said that the lights would dim when it was in use (not true) and that you could cook a grilled cheese sandwich on it-possible but I never tried.