Designing cars before the age of the computer

APEowner said:

Back on topic:

I'm often amazed at what was involved in design work before the age of computers.  I'm a mechanical engineer and a huge fan of 3D model based design.  I"m  old enough to have designed a bunch of stuff on a drawing board with pencil and paper but CAD and 3D modeling became a thing before I had to design any really complex assemblies.  Modern tools, properly used, make designing complex parts and assemblies so much faster.  It's also easier to identify assembly issues before you start making expensive parts.

There's absolutely no way I'd ever have made it in the field if we weren't using CAD.  Handwriting and general drawing skills are absolutely horrible.

Mr_Asa said:

APEowner said:

Back on topic:

I'm often amazed at what was involved in design work before the age of computers.  I'm a mechanical engineer and a huge fan of 3D model based design.  I"m  old enough to have designed a bunch of stuff on a drawing board with pencil and paper but CAD and 3D modeling became a thing before I had to design any really complex assemblies.  Modern tools, properly used, make designing complex parts and assemblies so much faster.  It's also easier to identify assembly issues before you start making expensive parts.

There's absolutely no way I'd ever have made it in the field if we weren't using CAD.  Handwriting and general drawing skills are absolutely horrible.

I can draw well enough to free hand a workable concept sketch and using drafting tools I can (or at least could) create good manufacturing prints but my hand writing is abysmal and hand lettering drawings used to take me forever.

Snapshot from the Mazda 100th Anniversary book of a blueprint for the Cosmo Sport:

The title block shows it was a half scale drawing, so that was a big sheet of paper.

Mr_Asa said:

APEowner said:

Back on topic:

I'm often amazed at what was involved in design work before the age of computers.  I'm a mechanical engineer and a huge fan of 3D model based design.  I"m  old enough to have designed a bunch of stuff on a drawing board with pencil and paper but CAD and 3D modeling became a thing before I had to design any really complex assemblies.  Modern tools, properly used, make designing complex parts and assemblies so much faster.  It's also easier to identify assembly issues before you start making expensive parts.

There's absolutely no way I'd ever have made it in the field if we weren't using CAD.  Handwriting and general drawing skills are absolutely horrible.

IIRC, many engineers had draftsmen that they would work with- so as long as your communications skills were good, you would be ok.

For me, and what I do- it's hard to imagine the huge number of strip chart recorders that were constantly used.  There were literal rooms of them used for big projects, like space work.  And given how they worked, you had to look at every single one of them all by themselves.

And it would still be generally limited to a hundred or so items you were tracking.  

Now I take thousands of things with a computer, can plot the important ones quickly, and use the rest if I need to.  And when I'm done, instead of hundreds of rolls of paper to deal with, it's just disk space.

Same goes for test outputs- instead of reams of green line computer paper with the data, I can get a digital copy, and put that into a spreadsheet (or database) of the results- making it a lot easier to see trends.

But the old data acqusition worked, and progress was made....

The designs for Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg by Alexis de Sakhnoffsky are wonderful.

In reply to stafford1500 :

Available Compute resources are doubling in capacity and halving in price on a less than yearly cadence.
Moore's Law has shrunk to a pinpoint in the rear view mirror.

Gigabytes and Terabytes have given way to Zetabytes and Yotabytes, and the pace is accelerating.

I work now migrating systems that 'used to be' Big Data, Hadoop, to 'the Cloud'.
Meanwhile, the K&E log log decitrig slide rule I learned on waits patiently for my return, needing no batteries or cords, only skilled hands.

clshore said:

Gigabytes and Terabytes have given way to Zetabytes and Yotabytes, and the pace is accelerating.

Whenever I hear stuff like that I remember way back in the day a video editor telling me that he had 60 Gigs of memory to do his editing with. I was completely blown away by the sheer volume, and also that he paid around $1k/gig for it.

In reply to alfadriver :

Somewhere in one of my old books they showed a huge bank of instrumentation with a high speed camera filming it.  Not as quick to scan through as stripcharts but certainly a lot easier to correlate data, I'd think.

Makes me feel like I am in easy mode looking at scatter plots and histograms.  Those used to take a lot of manual calculation, now you just choose which data to use and what math to apply to them and you get a result faster than it took you to think of what you need to know.

About 10 years ago, I was an engineer at an aerospace company that was stuck with one foot in the past.  They had a paper copy of every released drawing on file.  The digitial versions had to be printed, signed, then scanned back in as .tif files.  Reviews all had to be done on paper drawings.  We're talking anywhere from single page B size to ~10 page D size drawings.  We generally avoided any larger except for wiring diagrams.

I fought so hard against all that.  Computers were already strongly embraced for 10+ years there.  All of the literal paperwork was absolutely insane.  But alas, many people in management were extremely change resistant.  A lof of them made the mistake of making perfection the enemy of progress.  I had a few minor wins on that front but was losing the war pretty hard when I finally landed a job elsewhere and basically haven't touched a paper drawing since :)

That (sub) company was shuttered during the pandemic.