My lead drafter swore by manual drafting for first 3 months of training

He told me to sketch everything by hand before touching AutoCAD... I fought him on it for 2 weeks, then tried his way and my layouts came out cleaner with way fewer revisions, anyone else's old-timer mentor push them into hand drafting first?

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morgan.joseph2mo ago

The muscle memory thing is real but there's a weirder benefit nobody talks about. Hand drafting forces you to think about layering and lineweights in a way that's harder to fake digitally. When you're doing it by hand, you physically can't go back and tweak a line ten times, so your brain gets better at planning the whole drawing before you start. I had a guy make me do all my section cuts with actual trace paper overlays and honestly my xrefs stopped looking like spaghetti after that. AutoCad just makes it too easy to hide messy thinking behind clean looking lines.

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robertsmith2mo ago

Wait isn't that just a fancy way of saying "draw it right the first time or suffer the consequences"?

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