Program for making & printing drawings,blueprints,templates .......

[mickmutante]

what I found was that paper changes size sometimes quite dramatically from print to use. 500mm might turn into 501.5mm over a day or two! How much this will effect things at pickup sizes is difficult to say, but it's something to keep in mind

Yes. It depends of the room humidity you are working in. A friend of mine (architect) tryed to contol humidity and temperature of the room to draw and check his blue prints in the 80's.

[David Schwab]

Yes. It depends of the room humidity you are working in. A friend of mine (architect) tryed to contol humidity and temperature of the room to draw and check his blue prints in the 80's.

Having worked in the printing field since 1980, I can state that paper is never trusted to be dimensionally stable. It's hard enough to get four colors to register one after another on the press. But it's close enough for many things.

[Stealth]

I prefer Inkscape for vector drawings and Dia for schematics. Both free, both very precise and both compatible with Illustrator et al.

[marku52]

the google program is called "Sketchup", it is freeware, but not really a CAD program. More of a 3D modeler, I use it for making bobbin models for 3D printing. I had a previous post on this about 2 months ago. Sketchup is pretty quick to learn, but I don't think it is as easy to use for making a 2D drawing as a simple CAD tool like Delta.

[Joe Gwinn]

Having worked in the printing field since 1980, I can state that paper is never trusted to be dimensionally stable. It's hard enough to get four colors to register one after another on the press. But it's close enough for many things.

In the days before computers, in the airplane manufacture industry, critical drawings would be made on sheets of aluminum painted white, often at 1:1 scale.

[marku52]

Having tried out delta cad more thoroughly, I can really recommend it. the export> jpeg and .dxf are very useful features, and it really is simple to use.

[David Schwab]

In the days before computers, in the airplane manufacture industry, critical drawings would be made on sheets of aluminum painted white, often at 1:1 scale.

Guess you can't roll those up!

[Joe Gwinn]

Guess you can't roll those up!

No, that's not the problem. Unrolling is the problem.

[David Schwab]

No, that's not the problem. Unrolling is the problem.

[rjb]

Yes, try openoffice.org . It's freeware. The draw program is perfect for what you want to do....

I sometimes use the symbol editor in TinyCAD (also freeware from Sourceforge), but a limitation in both TinyCAD and OpenOffice Draw is that their highest "British units" resolution is .01". You might think that 1/100th of an inch is close enough, but sometimes it isn't.

For example, the center-to-center spacing for PBass polepieces is 3/8". That's 0.375"- not 0.37" or 0.38" or 9.5mm. Four holes in a row, drawn with either of these programs, won't quite match up with the holes in a standard cover.

But if you're doing all original work, and stick to metric, Bob's you're uncle. An advantage of using TinyCAD is that it's also a schematic capture program with a relatively short learning curve. People export data from TinyCAD to create PCB layouts, but I've only used it to draw schematics and templates.

-rb

[David Schwab]

But if you're doing all original work, and stick to metric, Bob's you're uncle.

I agree here. I use mm for everything. It's a nice small unit, and not as confusing as fractional inches, since I have to convert those into decimals. The exceptions are that I know I'm buying 1/16" or 1/8" steel blades, etc.

But for drawings I use metric.