Engineering Drawing - article by Good English Article Sites

You don't need to get into engineering drafting because it is beautiful, but it helps. Most of the people I know who do engineering drawing professionally really had a great passion for it as children. They were fascinated by buildings, machines, circuits, and other mechanical structures. Whatever it was, mechanical architecture always held an interest for people like that. They liked mechanical forms as much or more than organic, and would sketch them out. Maybe it was by drawing pictures of their own house, or perhaps it was sketches of the big factory out on the edge of town. Whatever it was, good engineers are doing engineering drawing long before they make it a profession.

A lot of people think of engineering drawing as something tedious and mechanical. Parts of it are, but there is a certain beauty to it that a lot of folks don't get the chance to see. It isn't just a matter of plugging numbers into a computer and getting out an engineering drawing. Everything must fit together in a certain way, but there is always room for elegance of design.

It is strange to me that engineers are so much less glamorous than architects. Architectural drawings are very similar to engineering drawings. The same concerns go into them. On the one hand, you want something solid and structurally well put together, but on the other hand you want something beautiful and elegant. Granted – when you are designing engineered parts, the beauty is less important than with a building, but it is still there to people who know how to appreciate it.

Although I'm not an engineer myself, I do work for an engineering drawing firm. Working with people who do engineering CAD has really changed my view of engineers. A lot of people think of them as obsessively technically-minded people, so fascinated by details that they forget the whole picture. This really isn't true of the good engineers. Don't get me wrong – you need to be meticulous to be an engineer. You do need to have all the details there, but that doesn't mean you have to forget the big picture. Knowing what the part you are designing goes into always improves the quality of your design. After all, when designing any part, you have to look at the whole. That is the nature of any system, from a government, to society, to a car engine.

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