Drafters are highly skilled engineers and architects who create technical and detailed drawings of machines, machine parts, and architectural floorplans. For years, the tools that a drafter needed to have at their disposal were manual in nature. Many of these tools were common to public schools and art and shop classes. Professional architects now use expensive, complicated software programs, which have now become more user-friendly.
Manual Drafting Tools
Manual drafting tools are those that are actively used in the process of drawing and measuring floorplans and blueprints. More specifically, manual drafting tools enable an architect to draw straight lines, nearly perfect circles, and also to draw elements of the building design proportionately.
Examples of manual drafting tools include protractors, compasses, T-squares, triangles, and pencils. Protractors are used to measure a circle or angle, compasses are used for making circles and arcs and triangles are used for making vertical and inclined lines. T-squares are utilized for drawing straight horizontal lines, and are sometimes incorporated as part of the structure of a drafting table, with the ends of the T-square attached to runners on either side of the table surface.
Finishing Drafting Tools
Finishing drafting tools are tools utilized to finish a design that has already been largely completed with manual drafting tools. Examples of finishing drafting tools include drafting paper, drafting films, foam boards and cutting mats. Drafting paper is long-lasting, archival-quality paper that doesn't smudge. Some drafting paper is completely blank, while other types of drafting paper are gridded. Drafting films, like drafting paper, are durable and smudge-resistant, but are made of thin sheets of mylar or acetate rather than paper.
Cutting mats are used underneath a floorplan or blueprint draft, as protection for your drafting table, when trimming the paper or plastic floorplan sheet with a sharp object is necessary. Foam boards are used as backing for mounting a finished floorplan or blueprint.
Drafting Software
With the advent and subsequent popularity of architectural software programs such as CAD (Computer Aided Design), and free programs like Google Sketch-up, the manual and finishing drafting tools of the recent past have begun to decline in frequency of usage. CAD is currently still the most popular drafting software-based tool among professional architects and engineers. CAD software has a long history, beginning as a doctoral research project at MIT in the early 1960s, and becoming a commercially used commodity in the 1970s.
Newer, user-friendly, and often free software programs like Google Sketch-Up are becoming increasingly popular with layman architects and budding engineers who are interested in architecture and engineering, but who may lack the education and work experience to learn and operate an expensive program like CAD.
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