ORIGINAL: Avaiojet
Don,
My graphics program allows me to draw and print. I can scale at the pressing of a key, but is any drawing program "really" necessary for building model airplanes?
Charles, no more necessary that a scroll saw, band saw and disk sander. Or the drawer full of small bar clamps, It is just a very useful tool. Now if I'm building a kit, it isn't much use, but when I'm able to scale my 4*60 wing down to fit a 40 size stick type plane, eliminate some of the spars and make some other mods andthen have a Sig quality set of parts templatesto work with, it becomes a very useful tool. Could I do it another way, of course I could. ButI like tools. The more the better. My Rhino is just another handy tool I have. Besides it gives my band saw, scroll saw and disk sander a lot more reason to take up shop space.
Don
Ijust had to adthis. We managed to win WW II with planes designed and built with slide rules and French curves. It was late into my apprenticeship in the early 60's that I first heard about this great milling machine that ran it's self and was so accurate that you could have it bore a hole, move aside and let the operator paint layout blue in the hole and then rerun the machine and it would come back and bore out the layout blue and not change the hole size. Even that was before CAD. When I serviced the Computers at Buick in the late 60's and early 70's, I saw how the tapes for those wonderful machines were made. The came off full sizedrawings on big sheets of aluminum, a TV camera that had a cross hair device and a big XY table that would hold the plan for the side of a car. Each point for the mill to use was located on the plan with the TV cross hairs and the XYreadoutof that coordinate was taken. All this information was stored on punch cards and they were then feed into a machine that punched the paper tape the milling machine read. They managed to make cars and planes and who knows what else using this method. Could we still do it that way, Of course we could. It's just that we have better tools at hand now and thank goodness we do. Iran across my old slide rule the other day. I need a refresher course in how to use it. Istill use my French curves for some work. and had I a lot of long strips of wood with different sandpapers on one side.