Drafting as a Second Job

I’m a deputy and chaplain for a local sheriff’s department. I'll probably be in this position until the day I retire, that is if I ever retire. I’m in the position God placed me in and am content with that. However, this job has never been known as a top paying vocation. Sometimes it’s hard to make ends meet with the salary I make.

But the facts are that I love the job I’m doing and finding a job you are content in is rare. I don’t want to give it up. Many of the officers feel the same as I do and take on part time positions or create their own jobs like lawn care or selling insurance, etc. Me? Well, before I put on the badge, I was an architectural designer and general drafter. As a matter of fact, I owned my own drafting service for the better part of fourteen years here in east Tennessee.

More and more people are working two jobs and those extra jobs are getting harder and harder to find. To me, it just doesn’t seem right to waste a skill that I’ve already learned. Better yet, there are enough inexpensive resources online that you could learn this skill on your own and then capitalize on it.

So after I realized it would be hard to make ends meet with just my deputy salary, I started letting others know I was taking on drafting jobs again. Shortly thereafter a few jobs started trickling in and I took on the projects that would only take a short while to complete. Mostly house plans, but I have drawn a few patent drawings and a few prints for machine shops. Many more jobs came in from around the country from the website I put online. The internet is another blessing from God. With the internet you can reach tens of thousands of prospective clients you would have otherwise never been exposed to.

The beauty of drafting is that with the advent of CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) programs, projects take little time to complete because of the control the computer gives you over the subject. What used to take hours to draw now only takes minutes or even seconds to complete.

There is enough work now that I can be picky about what I take in so that I don’t spend more than an hour or two daily so that I can still spend plenty of time with my family. I’ve even trained my wife and daughter to help me with the projects I’m working on. They love participating and helping with this little family business.

Tim Davis has created online drafting courses that will give you the skills to be a drafter in many different fields. Please go to http://maginvent.com for more details.

The Need For Mechanical Drafting Training

Mechanical Drawing is an important art and craft in the today’s mechanized world. So much so that it would be difficult to over estimate its importance. Without it, civilized life as know it now would very quickly come to a standstill. In this electronic and mechanical age, it has become indispensable as part of our industrialized system. It has the position, apart from its connection with theoretical mechanics, as a necessary feature in our economic production. Indirect or made by memory production methods are no longer commercially feasible. Every important piece of machinery or fixture or begins on paper or in a CAD program, and the accuracy and completeness of what a drawing shows of a mechanism depends on the craft of mechanical drafting.

A good mechanical drawing is in itself a powerful aide in design. In addition to its main goal as an accurate depiction of the ideas of the designer, it also is a practical test of the practicality of the functions of the parts drawn. A large part of ordinary machine design, where rigidity and practicality are what you want to end up with, is produced by the showing of the drawing (object) only. No complex mechanism can be designed and produced with complete accuracy without the help of a top notch mechanical drawing.

Scale drawings, while mainly intended for producing representations of structures in readable sizes for drawing, handling and storing, are also necessary to the properly proportioned design of all objects that if drawn in their natural size, are too large or too small to be completely seen by the naked eye. This is especially true where there is little or no graphic information for mathematical calculations.

The information needed for mechanical production demands an accurate drawing, displayed and explained by understandable and uniform methods, which are common knowledge to all who deal with the subject’s construction. Collectively, these constitute an important and invaluable skill, apart from any connection with abstract science, a skill which has to be acquired by plenty of work, care and diligence. This is most readily accomplished by making it a separate study in the early stages of drafting training; and that period is most needed, also, because this kind of skill is a powerful help to the progress of every other branch of vocational training or study that is involved in this type of work.

It should also be noted that, although special aptitude to draw is always a valuable asset, it is not a substitute for the necessity of studying and practicing drafting conventions, and that it is really necessary to go through a good training course in this field.

The author, Tim Davis, has built a very complete course in Mechanical Drafting at http://draftingservice.us/m101.

Learning Drafting as a Beginner

So many who are wanting to learn drafting jump right into the advanced goodies without learning the basics. I know this because I have had to coach so many who enroll in my advanced drafting courses without the slightest clue how to perform the simplest drawing task.

To correct this, I have created a beginners course in drafting called Mechanical Drawing 101 at http://mechanicaldrawing.8m.com/index.htm.

At this site you will learn basic shapes and how they are drawn on the drafting board and the CAD program. This course is donation based. If you can donate something, please do. If not, help yourself anyway...

Becoming a Drafter

Before every product, building, or anything else manufactured or built is completed, drawings and models made by someone using the skills taught in drafting courses are created. Every consumer product we use and every building we live or work in started out as a design. And every design had to be represented by a drawing in order for the people who constructed the end product would know how to make it. This is true for toys, furniture, electronics, etc...

In a drafting course, you'll not only learn to draw plans on paper, You will also learn how to use CAD programs on computers. With Computer Aided Drafting programs, you can make changes and add detail to plans very quickly and with an accuracy that can't be accomplished on a drafting board. With the CAD you can also make realistic 3D images or models that make it easier to understand the drawings you create in 2D.

You also have to learn one or more of the fields that use drawings. For example, some courses specialize in residential or commercial architectural drafting. With this type of drafting course, you would also study architectural terms and the problems of design and engineering that architects and designers have to deal with. You would also learn how to do an estimate for building materials from the details that you have drawn. Not to mention how to generate renderings of the proposed finished buildings in three dimensions called a rendering.

As a survey drafter, you would learn the needed mathematics and drawing techniques to draw boundaries and topography of a piece of property. How to research deeds and plats at the courthouse and interpret the field notes of the surveyors who go out and get the raw data you need.

When learning mechanical drawing or drafting, you study the mechanics of materials, industrial products and manufacturing systems, furniture construction, structural parts of engines, Heating, venting, and air-conditioning systems, plant layout, etc.

Learn these online in a fraction of the time it would take to learn it at vocational schools. Please go to http://drafting101.com/ for more information on learning to be a drafter.

A Course in Mechanical Drafting

Taking a course in mechanical drafting is not one of the easiest endeavors. A student needs to develop a discipline over the way he or she looks at things. They also need to develop a constructive way of thinking so that the student can think in a mechanical way. Not only this but they need to be trained to be able to communicate graphically so that the intentions of an idea, process, or item are understood without question in a fabrication or machine shop.

Mathematics are a major part of the learning process. In this field of drafting, some of those math classes you took in high school will actually seem like a necessary skill to have once you start your studies. Calculations of material stresses and deflection, calculations of material density and volume, sheering, load tables, etc. are only a few of the things a student will have to learn.

The student has to get a working knowledge of the fundamental operations and conventions of mechanical drawings from lettering and calculations, to the lay out of the work and so on in order that the completed sheet or sheets of drawings reflect a well arranged and clearly executed finished drawing. In the making of working drawings, it is often very difficult for the novice because of its conventional character of the work.

In today's engineering drafting offices, the student will need to be able to work on a CAD system. CAD is short for Computer Aided Drafting. In other words, it is a drafting board in a computer. And before a CAD system is learned it is always best to learn how to draw on a drafting board. Manual drafting may be a disappearing discipline but in my mind as a teacher it is indispensable.

As I said, it isn't the easiest career to learn. But like anything you have to learn to do, once you get past the basics it can become second nature to you. It is a high paying however and good pay means a more comfortable life. With enough determination, you too can do it. I did...

My name is Tim Davis and I draw architectural and mechanical plans for a living. I also teach others how to draw house plans, site plans, mechanical and shop drawings and other types of drafting that I have been trained to do in a virtual classroom on the internet called Drafting 101 at http://drafting101.com/