22/11/2025
During the 19th and most of the 20th century, all technical builds that required planning were based on technical drawings on paper, using pencils, T-squares, triangles, compasses and very large drafting tables. The drawing rooms of the largest engineering businesses looked often like the photo above (in this case, General Motors Technical Center). These drafts would then be reproduced as blueprints, via chemical processing. Any significant change on the project often meant full redrawing of the drafts. The first attempts at Computer Aided Design (CAD) used expensive mainframe computers and were hardly a tool for the regular engineer. We at DROM Engineering are remarkably aware of the technical revolution that the advent of AutoCad - firstly demonstrated at COMDEX in 1982 and released to the general user later that year- meant. By 1986 and ever since, these computer-driven tools have replaced the large-scale manual lofting involved in ship design, with its full-sized and scaled patterns of frames and of hull surfaces, drawn on loft floors, often described as “millions of paper drawings and huge pattern sheets laid out on the floors of enormous “lofting” rooms”. We now carry with us our own lofting rooms, and changes - whenever needed - are fast, furious and vertical - less room for errors, more room for good engineering work.
