Drafting machine

The 'Drafting machine' is a very useful tool in technical drawing consisting of a pair of scales mounted at a right angle on a articulated protractor head that allows an angular rotation. The Protractor Head (the couple of scales + protractor) is able to move freely across the surface of the drawing board, sliding on two guides directly or indirectly anchored to the drawing board. These guides, which act separately, ensuring the movement of the set in the horizontal or vertical direction of the drawing board, respectively, and can be locked independently of each other. The Drafting Machine was present in the design offices of European companies since the second decade of last century. It is curious to see how the authority of the Encyclopaedia Britannica explicitly specifies 1930 as the year of introduction of this tool: but an advert of "Memorie di architettura pratica" from 1913 places it twenty years before this date (at least in Italy ). In the older design sets, the movement of the Protractor Head was assured by parallelograms system that could keep the head in the same angle position throughout its route. The arms were balanced by a system of counterweights or springs. Typically, the machine is mounted on a drawing board with a hard and smooth surface, anchored to a base that allows its tilting and lifting. Thus the realization of drawing can be achieved in the most convenient way on a horizontal or vertical working surface. There are special versions for double-sized boards A0 (to make large drawings), or copying-boards with background illumination, which have allthat is necessary to provide specific support.This machine is very costly and one should not by this. This machine certainly bad for younsters as youngsters do not have to move for making diagrams. One should use all the instruments and make a diagram moving himself. But this machine have a big use according young India. With the drafting machine one can perform a series of drawing operations that otherwise could only be achieved with a much more complex use of the classic ruler square and protractor as - for example - drawing parallel lines, orthogonal lines, inclined lines according to a preset angle, mesurement of angles, etc. ... With the development of computer-aided design software ( CAD), the use of the drafting machines - especially in the professional sector - has been drastically reduced, and nowadays, the role for acheaving drawings on paper, is relegated to the plotter.