In praise of Fender schematics

[Groover]

There is something very esthetically pleasing to me about looking at the Fender schematics that were hand drawn (or should I say drafted) from the '50s and '60s. I get a great deal of pleasure from just looking at them. Whoever drew them was a very talented graphic artist.

I appreciate a good schematic by Spice or other programs too, from the intellectual standpoint, but they don't pack the same emotional punch.

Does anyone else share my decidedly un-scientific appreciation of them?

[Jazz P Bass]

Fender Draftsman

Last I heard the guy is still working. Altec Lansing, somewhere in NE Pennsylvania.
I'll try to get his name.

[Enzo]

I can appreciate a well drawn document. I learned my electronics in the 1950s, and it was a time of transition in conventions. We were shifting from mf to uf, from mmf to uuf to pf. Today mf means millifarad, but farad caps were just a dream 60 years ago, and mf meant microfarad. What we now call Hertz or Hz was them cycles per second or cps. While I have tried to adapt to changing times, that is the one that hangs on the hardest - I still find myself saying "apply a 400 cycle signal..." or refer to the "60 cycle" mains power. SO there were a number of different drawing styles.

We tend to draw tubes now vertical, but many circuits in the "old days" were drawn with tubes horizontal. Made some sense, as signal then would flow left to right through the stage. Many drawers rendered the tube grid as a wavy line like a resistor. Old Gibson drawings come to mind.

SO I often look at them as historical, old style drawings evoke memories of old times.

I took drafting - "mechanical drawing" - in junior high and high school. You did it by hand, there were no computers, let alone printers. Lettering was done by hand. My lettering was never the best, and I appreciate guys that can make neat lettering. SOme guys add a touch of style, like for example the middle horizontal strokes (the center thing on an E maybe) at a jaunty angle. Or maybe the lower leg of an R makes a curve or knee instead of a straight angle down. SOme guys would take the leg of an R and bring it down and extend it below the line a little. I found this little exaggeration a bit too ornate for my taste, but style is style.

We used to use - when allowed - something called - if memory serves - a LeRoy Lettering Set. You has this plastic guide with the letters milled into it, and a pantograph linkage for the pen. You clamped this guide to the drafting board and slid it along, and each letter you wanted, you traced from the guide with the pantograph, resulting in neat professional letters from the pen on your paper. The guides came in various sizes and fonts, and I believe the pantograph was adjustable to scale up or down.

[JHow]

...Does anyone else share my decidedly un-scientific appreciation of them?

Yes. I find them very aesthetically pleasing. I thought about silk-screening the 5F1 circuit on t-shirts once.

I think the fact that engineers also used to learn to draw (draft) back in the day probably explains why old cars and old guitars look so cool. The people who designed them had also developed some artistic sensibilities. Drawing on a computer graphics program really isn't them same exercise as rendering a bison in charcoal and ochre on the cave wall.

[cminor9]

I too find the old schematics do have a certain aesthetic appeal to them. I took some drafting class in high school, of course much later than Enzo (the internet was just then starting to take hold) and so I never took them with the intent of *using* the skills in a professional environment or becoming a drafter. I viewed it as art, just a bit more technical in nature. I guess I kinda see the old schematics in the same way.

[bob p]

I love the old Fender schematics too. Its obvious that they were drawn by someone in a scale that was just the right size to completely fill the sheet of paper. I can't tell you how many modern computer generated schematics I've seen that had itty bitty little components that were lost in a huge sea of white paper, and teeny weeny lettering on them. It was as if the components had become lost on the page due to their diminutive size.

I also like Enzo's point about technical drawings of old having an element of calligraphy to them. It used to be the same way in drawing molecular diagrams in chemistry. Back in the day, artistic representations of molecules involved a lot of personal vision and forced perspective, especially in organic chemistry. There was genuine warmth in the drawings. Today the CG drawings all feel cold and sterile.

[GibsonLover]

Fender Art

I always though they were done with templates, so that's how I started drawing them too. That was the style I was immediately drawn to. I enlarged the AA764 Champ on our plotter to a D size at work just to hang on the wall and take up space, and daydream. Looking at it now, the E's and A's and R's are all a little different. no template there. The tubes look very similar to each other. And who can draw 4 perfect circles freehand?
Still, very classy.
I use DxDesigner at work. It produces a very 'uninspired' presentation.

[Kazooman]

A Bit of Nostalgia For Enzo

Enzo:

Your memory serves you well. I still have a Leroy lettering set from about 40 years ago. Your description of how it was used is accurate, but the adjustment of the angle of the pantograph arm actually resulted in slanted, italic letters. The business end of the device has a small hole with a clamp to hold a fine-tipped India ink pen. The originals were simply a sort of cup with a fine tube tip with a weighted wire that ran down the center. That would shut off the flow of ink until you pressed the pen tip to the paper, thereby pushing the wire up a bit. REALLY messy at times. You did not get a second chance. An entire page of work could be spoiled in an instant.

I did all of the drawings for my chemistry Ph.D. thesis using plastic templates for the chemical structures and the Leroy set to enter the atomic symbols and text. Hours of painstaking work that can be done in minutes with modern software.

Here's a quick snapshot of the Leroy set. I couldn't find the pens.



PS: I found my Leroy set in a box of old memories, right next to my two slide rules.

[JHow]

Wow! Cool device. I learn a lot on this forum.

[hasserl]

Having an aesthetically pleasing schematic makes it easier to read and understand, improving efficiency. Less pleasing schematics can be tiresome to read, difficult to understand and inefficient.

As a heavy equipment mechanic I spent a lot of time digesting schematics of all sorts from many different mfgr's, some are plain difficult to use. Ladder style schematics (if you haven't seen these, they are schematics drawn with positive and negative lines drawn horizontally on the top & bottom of the page, then all the components are drawn inbetween those two lines, with their positive and negative connections attaching them to the pos/neg lines, giving the appearance somewhat like a ladder) can be very difficult to use. I suppose some engineers like them, because they do have some advantages, but they are very non-intuituve for a technician to trouble shoot a system when he has no idea where the components are located on the machine, which in some cases can be the size of a large room, or bigger. Grouping components together that actually reside close to each other in location helps, particularly when you don't have a layout diagram, which are very rare. Including a little dotted line around components to indicate a physical PCB helps a technician a lot. Ladder schematics don't allow for that.

Back to amp schematics, the Fender schematics are very nicely done, pleasing to use, and having layout diagrams helps even more (man I wish more companies provided those).

I know there are several schematic drawing programs out there, but I just use Microsoft Paint, which is packaged with Windows, and it's easy to draw up nice clean schematics.

[Enzo]

Some templates were used. Letters were freehand, but if you needed circles - as for around tubes - a little plastic or metal template with various size round holes was nearby. Perfect circles all consistent size. I used to have templates for circles, ovals, rectangles. And of course who can forget a set of French Curves?

There were symbol templates too. If you didn;t want to freehand a resistor, you could make pages of them all look alike with an electronic symbol template. Resistor squiggle, the curves and straight lines of a cap, a row of circles to make inductors. You could freehand them, but the template made them all uniform in size and shape.

And from the hand drawn days, who didn;t have an eraser shield? A thin piece of metal the size of a playing card with various holes and slots in it. You placed this thing over a drawing to mask off certain thing while erasing some detail. If you had three wires running parallel and needed to erase the center one, that is tough to do freehand, but the shield placed over the lines with a narrow slot over the one to erase let you rub away without damaging the lines you wanted to keep. It was the drawing/eraser equivalent to a painter and masking tape, I suppose.


I forgot the Leroy set family connection to K+E, long known for their slide rules. I still have my slide rules from college. A fancier one about 60mm wide and a smaller "pocket" one maybe 30 x 150mm. And leather holsters you could hang on your belt.

Hasserl, I used to service relay systems (old stlye mechanical pinball machines) and the schematics were all ladder style. I associate that style with relay logic, even though my refrigerator at home uses the same style. I actually liked them, but I agree, it can be frustrating when not familiar with the particular equipment, when you have no idea where something is located. In relays, the coil circuit can be in the bottom of the schematic, while the contacts it activates can be at the top. All you have to go on is "K4" or "player hold" next to the coil, and similar legend across town at the contacts. Andf of course with 8 sets of contacts on a relay, the various ones can be in totally unrelated (electrically) circuits.

[Gibsonman63]

You guys are really bringing back some memories. In fact my electronics workbench is my Dad's old drafting table. He modified the legs so he could lower it more and it served as our dining table for Thanksgiving.

I took all of the drafting courses I could in school and worked on the board for about a year before the bottom fell out in the early eighties. There is a lot to be said for the people who mastered the art of drafting. I don't know if the perfectionists gravitated toward drafting or if years of drafting made you a perfectionist, but those guys could really be meticulous and detail oriented. There is a real art to laying out a drawing and having a feel for what it is going to look like and how much space it is going to take before you start to draw. Now it has gotten way beyond AutoCAD. Software is laying everything out. If you input things correctly, you will have a technically correct drawing, but it won't necessarily be easy to read. The other difference is that in the coarse of a project there are many more revisions because documents are much easier to modify now.

Here's a few more drafting tidbits.

We used to use blue or purple pencils for construction lines because they would not show up when you ran the copies (bluelines). And the bluelines had a very strong ammonia smell. Then you had to fold them all so you could put them in the job books or roll them up and stick them in a tube to mail to the client.

Remember the lettering guide. It had a little holes you stuck you pencil in to produce evenly spaced lines for lettering.

The electric eraser. You really needed an erasing shield with one of those. Then you needed a drafting brush to brush away all of the little bits of eraser.

We used different hardness of pencil lead to produce different weights of lines.

There were guys that I worked with that had the wire record holders that would hold about 50 45rpm records. They would fill them full of templates.

Sepias? Apeture cards?

I digress...

[Kazooman]

Yep, the good old days.

Enzo: I have a 10" K&E Decilon slide rule in the original leather belt holster. I have to admit that I never hung this baby on my belt, but it got me through many years of school.

Gibsonman: I do remember the smell of blue prints. My father worked for an engineering supply business (that's where I got my K&E stuff). On occasion I could earn a few bucks by folding blueprints. They would come out of the printer reeking of ammonia and needed to be folded right away. Most customers had their own specific fold pattern that suited their files and field needs. I learned the "telephone company fold", the General Electric fold" and many more.

How did we ever survive?

[Enzo]

We may make more revisions now because it is easy to do, but the other side of that coin is - the revisions get documented. 50 years ago certain revisions might have gone undone or been done but never documented. Imagine if Gibson had CAD back then, we might have schematics that match the variations on their amps.

Remember the pencil pointers? You sharpened the pencil the ordinary way to expose the lead. Then there was this little metal crock-pot of a thing, and the lid was on an axle so it could spin. Then there was a small tube sticking up near the edge of the lid. There was a small hole in the bottom of the tube. Around the interior of the pot was an abrasive.

You poked your pencil down the tube, lead sticking down into the litle hole. Then using the pencil as a handle, you cranked the lid around and around. The lead sticking down inside abraded against the inner wall and was honed to a fine point.

[Kazooman]

Wow, this thread is going the way of Lawrence Welk re-runs (without the gaudy colored suits)!

Yes, I remember the pencil pointers. However, in my class we were not allowed to use them. We could use the "sharpener" (or whatever you would call such a device) to remove the wood exposing the naked rod of pencil lead. Then we had to sharpen it to a good point by rubbing it on sandpaper at the correct angle with a twisting motion. I also remember the dictum to rotate your pencil as you drew a line to avoid creating a flat spot.