CAD program

[catsittingstill]

 I got Delta CAD for the Mac yesterday.  It's a 2-D computer aided design program that Terry, the sound engineer who offered to advise me about my recording booth, said was a good one to do plans in, seeing as he was having trouble interpreting my pencil drawings.

I ran through the tutorial yesterday and it's actually quite a clever little program.  You can tell it you want to draw lines, and there are different buttons for horizontal, and vertical lines (as well as a button for lines that go any which way you set.)  This is nice because it makes it easy to draw  lines that are perfectly parallel or perpendicular.  Furthermore you can specify the length of any line you draw--you can even set a scale (1/2 inch = 1 foot to choose a nonrandom example) and then pick one end of the line and type in 5' 8 3/4" and it draws a line representing a 5' 8 3/4" line drawn at that scale.

If you draw a line 31 inches long and you meant it to be 32, you can pick Edit, pick the scale button and type 32/31 and have it redraw itself to be the right length.

You can have the house plan in one layer, the layout of the crawlspace in another (and then scootch the crawlspace layout around so that the place the water-in pipe went in through the wall in the crawlspace lines up with the place the water-in pipe comes out of the wall under the toilet and now you know about where everything is under the floor) and the recording booth in a third.

I have the house plan for the area entered, and also the crawlspace layout (water, sewer, vents, joists) entered and am in the process of drawing the booth.  And the hours have been just melting away.  It's fascinating.  It was 40$ which was a bit daunting, but I think it may be worth it just for the entertainment value.

Comments

[laughingrat]

Huh! That is a pretty sweet sounding little program.

[catsittingstill]

Yes, it really is pretty impressive.

[randwolf]

Hee. $40 is cheap. Maybe I'll give the demo a try.

[catsittingstill]

Alas, there doesn't seem to be a demo. But yes, 40$ is pretty cheap for a CAD program, realistically. It's just that it's more money than I had planned on spending and I try to be careful about things like that because they can add up.

[janewilliams20]

If it'll do all that, $40 is very cheap.

[catsittingstill]

So far I'm very favorably impressed with it. It took me a while to get the hang of layers because there is no tutorial for that part, but I think I've got it now.

And I agree, 40$ is cheap for a CAD program; most of them run hundreds. It's just...I hadn't expected to *need* a CAD program and was a little taken aback when my careful pencil drawings weren't good enough. I had drafting lo these many moons ago when drafting involved graphite, and my drawings are, in my opinion, pretty decent.

[randwolf]

You mean, for a contractor? I thought you were doing your own building.

[catsittingstill]

For Terry, the sound engineer who was going to advise me about my recording booth. I sent him tiffs of my scanned pencil drawings and he said he was having trouble reading them (or rather interpreting them if I remember correctly) and recommended this.

[randwolf]

Drawing can be like writing in that--perfectly clear to you, and not to anyone else. You might also want to take a look at Frank Ching's Architectural Graphics for ideas of how to make drawings clear to a reader.

[catsittingstill]

I suppose that is true; the booth might be "too much in my head and not enough on the paper" as we sometimes say of stories.

I wonder though, how that would change because the drawing is in CAD form?

Thank you for the book suggestion. It looks like it costs 30$ at Amazon, but my public library can get it through interlibrary loan, though it might take a week. I will keep it in mind.

[randwolf]

"how that would change because the drawing is in CAD form?"

I don't know. Why not ask your consultant? Perhaps it's easier for him to read the clearer lines of a CAD drawing. Perhaps he prefers to view the drawing in a CAD program, or wants to print it and scale it. But also, he might be looking to use the drawing as input to analysis tools and it's much easier to do that if it's in a standard file format with a known scale.

Older editions of Architectural Graphics are useful and cheap; I'm still using my third edition, and Powell's has one for $9. But you might check used bookstores locally; UT at Knoxville has an architecture school, and there are probably copies around.

[catsittingstill]

Well, come to think of it, in the CAD program it's easy to get dimensions of something, and at that scale the width of a pencil line in a pencil drawing could be a quarter of an inch or so; perhaps he was concerned the drawing wouldn't be accurate enough.

Though the lines in the CAD program are contributing a bit of thickness on their own so I think the dimensions of various things might be off a bit.

I could check in McKay's for a copy--it's just that Knoxville is an hour's drive away and the books in McKay's are not particularly well organized. It turns out a number of my local libraries (well, local enough to do ILL) have it, so maybe my library can get it reasonably quickly.

[randwolf]

If the lines are on the scale of the objects you're representing, then perhaps doing details at 3/4" = 1' or so would help. This is one of the things that CAD is good for; you can just magnify the original drawing, and then add additional graphics to clarify the detail as they are needed. If you can find one of Thallon's books on wooden building construction (yeah, just what you need, another book recommendation) he gives lots of drawings you can use as examples. (Look at http://goo.gl/7yODl for parts of one.)

I see why you wouldn't want to head over to your local bookstore; it isn't very local, is it?