My friend Bill’s Dad was an engineer for a major aviation manufacturer, and was among the first to use their brand-new (in the late 1960’s) computer-aided design & drafting (CADD) program. Their metal fab shop was still making drawings by hand, and asked him how precise the tolerances could be on a CADD drawing. He told them it could be as tight as a ten thousandth of a inch (0.0001″) so they asked him for such a drawing – aviation components have famously tight tolerances – so he entered it all in to the mainframe computer, which took a considerable amount of time and resources, but it generated the drawing that the fab shop needed. Later, they came and told him they were ready to make the part and asked if he wanted to come see it. When he got to the shop, he saw his drawing next to a piece of sheet metal on a table. The cut lines (specified by his drawing, which, again, had tolerances to the ten thousandth of an inch) were laid out in grease pencil, and a technician was readying an oxy-acetylene torch to make the cuts. That was the last time he took the trouble to make a drawing for that particular shop.
In the 1990’s, I worked for an industrial pump company, and a big part of my job was using CAD (some time in the 1970’s or 1980’s, the 2nd “D” fell out of use, and it became known as computer-aided design, or computer-aided drafting) to make drawings showing our customers where the pump’s fluid ports would be (so they could prepare the suction & discharge piping) as well as the fabrication drawings for the baseplates that we mounted the pump and drive equipment on. The computer I used for that sat on my desk, whereas the computer that Bill’s Dad used occupied several rooms in the building. I also used a mouse & keyboard instead of punch cards and magnetic tape reels to input my shapes & dimensions. And I don’t even want to think about how much more power their computer used.
I learned quickly that the first law of CAD is “never draw anything twice”, so I was ALWAYS pleased when manufacturers had CAD files to send me. I could simply drop those in to my drawings, and go about my day. That’s why, when I started this job at EXAIR, one of the things that impressed me most was our comprehensive CAD Library in our Knowledge Base. We do require registration (fast & free) as a user, but once you’re in the system, you can instantly download CAD files for any of our products. We even have solid models for folks who work magic with 3D design (I was strictly a 2D guy.)
For any stock EXAIR product, you’re only a few mouse clicks away from getting drawing files. Our R&D engineers can also generate drawings of custom products – special length Air Knives, Line Vacs with custom flanges, etc. – upon request. If you’d like to find out more, give me a call.
Russ Bowman, CCASS
Application Engineer
Visit us on the Web
Follow me on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
