I’ve worked in both the building structures and the mech./equipment/product areas..., High School or early college, makes no difference, but you need a means of communicating your engineering designs (thingies) and thoughts to others, and as we have seen here, all to often, words sure as hell don’t do the trick. Hand sketches and the drafting board, to scale, work fine for me during my design process, the old goat that I am, then red-lining the drawings. CAD is wonderfully efficient and accurate in the right hands and with the right engineering guidance, but I have to relearn to use it every time I try to use it, because I don’t use it enough and it is so complex to manipulate. And, it can also produce drawings, of thingies, with infinite views, which can’t be built, all because the CAD’er. doesn’t know the error of his ways, and has no guidance, and that’s meaningless drawing, not design or real drafting. The CAD screen doesn’t give me the same, a real, sense of proportions, fit-up, clearances, spacial relationships, when I have to scroll all over the screen to see the parts that relate, but I can’t see them on the same screen at a scale I can see, nor is that any good out in the shop. It’s kinda a wiz-bang, look what I can produce or do, without any real understanding of the facts of the matter, which blows my mind, and produces little of real value, at that stage. I understand, that in the right hands, it does ultimately produce production drawings. But, it can also produce a sketch of a structure which the CAD’er. has no idea of how it really works, or if it can really even be built; which leads to many unrealistic questions, showing complete lack of understanding of the problem, but a sketch of that nonetheless. The best draftsman I ever worked with, never finished high school, but somehow got through a vo.tech. school, and had an incredible mechanical intuition, I never had to tell him anything twice, he wasn’t afraid to ask a question if he didn’t understand, that’s the mentoring thing and the trust that develops in that relationship. And, CAD however it advances, will never replace that native ability. Fact is, he was my age, just never had the same college opportunities that my parents provided for and instilled in me. Finally, I trusted him with engineering for us that I would not have trusted other (real?) engineers to do, who worked around or for us. He never had CAD, but he had an innate ability, understanding, intuition, which CAD will never replace. He could make our designs come to life before they were built, so they could be built.
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