When I was 12 or 13, in 7th grade, I was allowed for the first time to elect 3 of about 6 shop classes I would take. I recall picking WoodShop, Letterpress Printing, and Mechanical Drawing 1.

In the 8th grade we all took the same shop class, Metal. It consisted of Foundry, Forging, Machining and Sheet Metal.

You could also elect Mechanical Drawing 2, which I did eagerly.

These classes were a major blast! I thoroughly enjoyed each one. If I had to do one over again and pick just one, I would be torn between running a lathe or a letterpress.

I've only rarely had the opportunity to play with such nice equipment.

There were three teachers, and all three were very good and knew their crafts really well.

I went on to great Drafting achievements at Perkins & Will, Architects Engineers Planners in Chicago, where I actually got to do real steel and concrete design calculations with some of the greats of the field, and we all still had big drafting boards, Drafting Machines, slide rules and the first handheld calculators.

Best part, I actually got paid too.

Nowadays, ha! who would draw floor plans by hand, and add fractions of an inch?

Manually solve beam shears and moments using moment distribution on sheets of form paper?

So, I sometimes long for the old simple look, but being lazy I too can just use this new technology to get a pretty good emulation.

The next few pages show fake brochures. I used Bryce and some PhotoShop layers to combine them side by side, so you could see.

Thanks for viewing!

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