B-size schematics

Not so much when your B-size printer is inkjet, like my Brother MFC-6490CW.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We have a Brother inkjet. It's pretty good but the B-size paper feed is a little flakey. Sometimes it adds a few blank sheets in the middle of a schematic.

Is the ink poisonous?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Not that I know of, but if it gets wet it goes everywhere, specifically into the table.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

OK, I'll be careful to not spill my beer.

The supplies are cheap compared to a typical laser printer. Ours copies and scans and all that too.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That's all I use now, for schematics. Miss the old hp plotters, C and D size drawings were glorious.

Cheers

The best thing about them was that you could gather a bunch of engineers around them, and argue about the detailed design.

When that happened at EMI Central Research, back in the late 1970's you'd have to go around the area later and collect all the cups half-full of cold coffee, rinse them out and let them drain in the sink.

Somehow none of my later jobs had the same lab-wide involvement. We would natter about the design in progress, but the coffee got drunk while it was still warm.

Maybe we'd moved on to better coffee.

That brings back fond memories and a few nightmares. When I still had my palatial office (1991 - 2020), pen plotters were among the devices I repaired. My office was located in a small office building, which at its height, included 4 architectural design companies. Two were one person operations, one had about 5 employees and one had about 20 employees. The largest specialized in water fountain design. Overall, about 10 different pen plotters, all made by HP. There was one C size inkjet plotter, which I was very unreliable and which avoided and eventually refused to repair (clogged jets messy leaks).

It was decided that I should act as the building plotter maintenance technician. Since most of the problems were either mechanical (cleaning and rubber rollers) or Windoze device drivers, I thought I could handle the problems. That was wrong, but I was too busy to notice. I had little idea what I was doing, but that never stopped me. Besides, I was much cheaper than having an authorized repair tech to drive about 50 miles for on-site repair, or the cost of a truck rental to bring the plotter to a service center, plus the weeks or months long downtime. I also avoided working on any plotter that had an active warranty or service contract.

Overall, fixing plotters was fairly easy, almost profitable and somewhat hypnotic from watching the pen and paper move.

Most of the architectural final drawings were on D size paper: "Architectural Paper Sizes - Arch, ANSI & ISO Charts"

Standard incantation before plotting: "Let use do some plotting comrades".

I still have a big wooden drafting table, with electric eraser and pencil sharpeners. I can design on D-size vellum a lot better than on a screen.

I can have someone CAD things for me, to make B-size schematics.

It's getting harder to buy vellum and good pencils. They don't make the Boston sharpeners any more.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I had three pen plotters up until a few years ago. I noticed I hadn't been rendering anything onto *paper* in more than a decade so why keep (big!) products that handle paper -- aside from the nostalgia?

Anything that I really need to print (tax forms, greetings cards, etc.) I do at the library (10c per page) or, better quality, the nearest kinkos. The latter particularly good for printing floor plans at intended scale (instead of rendering onto a 30" monitor).

Let someone else pay to maintain the equipment, esp if your usage isn't high (though I *do* miss my Phasers <sigh>)

The only real problems I had with pen plotters was pens drying out "mid plot". Machine can't notify you that you are "out of ink" so you end up having to watch the whole process. Rapidograph-style "technical pens" an improvement over the felt tips on-the-job but considerably harder to maintain.

Noting the ratios of paper sizes to each other, a common trick was to draw on D and print on B. When I was designing CPUs, I would draw on *E* and print on C... still somewhat manageable as E size drawings inevitably ended up rolled instead of lying flat (my E-size "map cabinet" has been commandeered by SWMBO for art-related items as they truly *can't* be "rolled". She also ended up with the various colored inks that I had used in said pens!)

Now we have a giant TV screen on the wall next to a whiteboard. The combination works great.

And we can have remote people attend the design reviews, which we couldn't do in the olden days.

My engineers here are tea drinkers. Productivity suffers.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics