Heading into retirement, I have a T Square, drawing board and drafting tools I don't think I've used in 35 years. With the advent of CAD I suspect these things are obsolete as typewriters today. But do they have any value or are they just trash can fodder?

Find a place to give them to a kid so someone can learn how to draw. All kids still draw.

My daughter is an Architect...she has drawing board in her home office, Doubt it gets used for work much but it is a nice decorative touch. I'll bet you can find someone that wants it.

If you were closer I would be interested. If it’s a quality draft board there is a market for it, some nostalgia to those and some still use them. The Craigslist route is useless for something like that but check out some forums and you may find a value and avenue to sell.

I was a draftsman for years until I learned Autocad then we were forced to learn Pro/E which is now CATIA. I still have all my drafting equipment and hundreds of drawings in tubes that will probably be thrown out one day, sad but true but beginners still need to learn manually before heading to the world of make believe. I taught drafting for a year but hat was in 1987, I doubt it is taught anywhere anymore...

If it pivots from horizontal to angled, it could be re-purposed as a "craft table".
Always like drafting tables, and I knew an illustrator who always used one.

Someone will buy it so don't toss it. The ones I have seen are taller than a normal desk so they require a taller chair.

Nope, nothing fancy, just a plain board, small, not for architectural use, for mechanical drafting mebbe 24" x 30"?, and standard T Square. Tools were bought at the college book store, pretty standard Stadler stuff, some from the '70's, some '80's. At least it's not chinesium, I think?

Sorry I can't help but know how you feel. I retired two years ago, started my career as a draftsman on the board in 1972. Switched to CAD in 1983. I recently moved and found my old mechanical pencils, scales, templates, leroy lettering sets, etc.

Hate to throw it away but can't find anyone who wants it.

The old draftsmen here will remember eraser shield, scum-x, pencil pointer, Good times. Jim

Sounds like the common equipment I used in drafting class, id think not hardly any value other then to one whos into it who probably has the basic hands on stuff already.

I still have all that stuff too, bought a modular desk system and it has a drafting board built-in. All of that is under the board, haven't looked at it in almost 20 years. Must have 60-70 mechanical pencils of different lead sizes and probably 1000 pieces of lead...LOL

It is, just hate to throw good stuff out. Should've done it decades ago.

That's what I learned drafting on back in HS, still do it that way on the few things I need to draw up. Easier for me to dredge up 38 year old training than learn CAD.

I don't, however, have the tools to do it much. Been looking though.

I don't, however, have the tools to do it much. Been looking though.


There ya go

I have an older copy of Autocad on my laptop and haven't even brought it up in 3 years, guess I just don't design anything anymore...

Imagine a complete, top of the line bar-and-rail drafting machine, with degree-indexed rotating "square head," plus pivoting table, with the borco vinyl surface covering (which was $100 by itself back in our day) .. was happily given to me by a local civil engineering firm who just wanted the darned thing gone from their office..

In that sense a T-square and table, triangles, architect and engineer's scales no longer have a dollar value.. maybe some good Schaefer compasses, dividers, or circle oval hex templates, can have *some* usefulness.

A daycare center might enjoy the templates..
You *could* ask your local High School Vocational-Technical department, but they likely have already switched to digital..
...you could try a senior center (if they have someone with the background and the space) or a youngster really wants to draft by hand.

I hate to say it, but hand drafting is gone from educational and commercial use, except for us dinosaurs.. I'm 56 and still enjoy handdrafting my drawings..

..but everything can be done better digitally at a desk with a keyboard and mouse, or drawing tablet and stylus..
- Art

I could tell who did the drafting on a drawing by the style of hand lettering without looking at the initials in the revision block, CAD changed that. Also, the annual performance review had a evaluation of line work and lettering.

Stick it on craigslist or whatever site like that is most common in your area before throwing it out. You never know who might want it. I've seen some at people who do drawings and artwork so you never know. Our office had some really nice ones that got chucked 15 years ago or so during a renovation.

I'll be 56 next month. Not sure things are done better digitally. We had to do the work to figure it out, today not so much, it's more akin to doing arithmetic with a calculator rather than learning how to cipher in your head.



I will admit my penmanship really improved once I took drafting classes.

Drafting-
First class of the day in 7th grade. Instructor showed the whole class once how to do something and you were on your own. No checking or have TA on hand, just "here you go" . If you sat there and did nothing all class all semester, you got a D.

This day and age, I would have said "F" this teacher and learned everything on Youtube by a person who cared enough about teaching to post a video.

You could donate it to a charitable, non-profit, thrift store.

and what was that paper we drew on called, rice paper ? the super thin, kinda see through, kind of a yellowish white color........

Sounds like you are talking about vellum

Yep, vellum was what we used in 9th grade back in the 60's.

I used to have three drawing boards, t-squares and a big box of instruments, pencils, leads, erasers (no undo button back then:), triangles and templates. I think my wife burned my last board when we moved 16 months ago.

I think I might still have my slide rule. Some of you guys remember those. I had to rescue mine decades ago when I found it holding open a window at my mom's house. Lol. I hadn't used it since T.I. came out with scientific calculators. Probably the only thing I remember how to do with that "slip stick" is ahh, prop open a window.

Me too, that TI SR-10 got me in a lot of trouble. .866025... is NOT the exact value of √3/2

I don't know where that SR-10 has gotten off to, I know I didn't throw it out, I'm a pack-rat but a rank amateur next to the wife...

Slightly off Topic funny story about drafting paper.


For about 25 years of my 37 years at General Motors I programed and operated Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMM). Everything from theodolites to laser trackers, portable articulating arms to big dual arm machines that measured a whole car. At the back of our CMM room we had a small maybe 10' X10' room that had our cad computers and plotter. The plotter back then (around 1988 or so) was a huge dynosaur of an electrostatic printer that plotted on 5 ft wide paper that loaded into the machine as a large roll thousands of feet long. It takes 2 people to load the roll into the machine. This plotter was networked to our 3 Sun workstations. One morning I came in and when i went back to that room I literally could not see anything through the window in the door. The entire contents of the roll of paper was all balled up and filled the entire room. After we finished laughing our butts off and got the biggest paper wad in the world cleared out of the room we called EDS and had them come down to figure out what the heck happened. Here is what they learned from checking a network log. There were 2 of these plotters in the plant. There was another identical plotter and Sun workstation in the front office for the use of the engineers. An engineer had come in on a weekend to plot multiple copies of a large set of drawings. He did it on the weekend because he knew it was going to take a long time to plot and didn't want to tie up their only big plotter during regular hours. He brought it all up on their workstation and sent it to the plotter. Nothing happened so he sent it again and again and who knows how many times he must of hit the send to plotter button and still nothing happened. He must have been very frustrated at coming in on a weekend and getting nothing accomplished. You probably guessed by now that he sent it to our plotter instead of theirs.

We called it onion skin.

I still have my Texas Instruments SR-50, circa 1974, $149.95. The company offered us to buy one and we could pay it back by payroll deduction. I had a slide rule but was using Smoley's Combined Tables book at the time and declined the offer.

I bought one later and still have the Smoley's. It's just another book that no one wants.

Your post reminded me of making copies before CAD and plotters. If you wanted to copy a large format drawing, you used a print machine with gallon of bubbling ammonia! Today, the entire room would be considered an bio-hazard area and you would need a respirator.

Oh yeah, I was around for the bubbling ammonia vats! We also had many plotters and used the heck out of them until the late 90's when thing changed quickly...

We still have one of those in the office. Used occasionally for making blue-line prints of old maps in storage. Speaking of old office equipment, the boss picked up one of these when they were brand new. If you like mechanical wizardry, the Curta Calculator was impressive!

We flew the first airplanes, built the first atomic reactor, and went to the moon with paper, pencil, and slide rules.

Almost all of the first “drafting and mapping” was related to ancient mining.
The first “railroads” were built inside mines so that women and children could push ore carts and leave the men to dig.

President Herbert Hoover
aka “The Doctor for Sick Mines” in China and Australia,
felt so strongly about this that he personally translated the 450 year old book “De Re Metallica” from Latin to English in his spare time for relaxation.

I think kids should be taught a semester of mechanical drafting to “improve their 3D thinking.“
I think kids should be taught “long hand” cursive writing and sentence structure to improve their speaking skills like Winston Churchill was given 3 times (he flunked it twice).
I think kids should get a one hour class on how a 3 foot in diameter “circular slide rule” works like I was given in PSSC Chemistry in 1970. The teacher then gave each of the students a 3 inch plastic circular slide rule he paid for out of his own pocket.
In 1974 a beloved engineering professor Audrey Palmer had an eight foot long straight slide rule on the side wall of the classroom and would walk over and patiently slide out calculations.

We are dinosaurs.

We had a full room ammonia print machine...I still remember the day the adjustment knob came off spraying it out into the room! Remember the old Calcomp pen plotters that took 2 hours to create one sheet too. Now the kids coming out of school think that if they know BIM (revit) they automatically know archtecture

that was the term i remember now, thank you !
although vellum was probably the correct name.

Onion skin was thinner, yellowish and more transparent than vellum, so you could tape a piece over top of a drawing and create an alternative layout, or study, without revising the original drawing.

When we started using CAD, I remember one of the old timers taping a piece of it over the CAD monitor so he could make a sketch and explain what he wanted me to change. I laughed then, but now I am the one who can't keep up with technology.

I used to be in charge of the drawing storage at our company. We had about 7 decades of drawings stashed away in several dozen cabinets and a whole wall of a building full of tubes from floor to ceiling. I don't know which was worse- trying to roll old drawings tight enough to get into the tubes or opening up a cabinet and having a bunch of drawings fall down into it. The vellum drawings were dirty and stunk but at least they didn't get worn out and tear like old paper. PDFs changed all that.

Being we're talking about the old way of drawings. How many people remember working to Brown Line Drawings??

Not me, I thought we went from blueprint to blueline? One place I worked had a Bruning machine, didn't use ammonia, used some sort of fairly viscous "developer".

Early blueprint machine: