Popped up on Facebook this week; a friend posted some guitar innards and a commenter referenced engineering templates – and it was off to the races.
Picket 1610I – A personal favorite by dint of the transformers and the Delta-Wye transformer windings
Which is more terrifying:
- I’m of an age where I actually used these for their intended purpose?
- I still have these?
- I knew exactly where they were? They’ve sat waiting patiently in the hanging file folder I put them in when I started consulting in ’95.
Apparently one can still purchase these – although I’m not sure how many are sold. I’ve not seen a drafting table in use (except perhaps ironically) for many years.
Truth be told my love affair with these tools goes back much further – Dad worked in IT back when the Univac brand was on top of the industry, and weekend trips to his office meant a morning of messing around with programming templates, making punch cards, shooting big rubberbands (used to bundle punch cards or print-outs). Every year at xmas we’d get a dot-matrix, ascii art peanuts calendar – I found a pretty representative sample at Hackaday.
