Letters to the Editor

Prompted by Modeling This picture was taken in the summer of 1939 in Superior, Wisconsin, my hometown. I was 19 years old at that time. The rubber powered model was a Jabberwock made from a kit available locally. The other airplane is a diamond shaped fuselage, with what I believe is an Atom engine. The photo was taken for and by a newspaper article which featured my winning a Free Flight model airplane contest held in Duluth, Minnesota. I recently bought a Midwest Jabberwock II for old time sake but the first one still takes the cake. It's obvious my interest in aviation prompted me to become a pilot. I received my Navy Wings in March of 1944. I was then assigned to fly torpedo bombers. Incidently my instructor was ensign Gay of Squadron 8 fame. A few months later I was reassigned to a multiengine squadron for duty. At the time WWII ended I was stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines. Our squadron VPB104 received Two Presidential Unit Citations. I received the Air Medal. I have been active in RC [Radio Control] since my 1982 retirement in Florida. ... Stanley Karwoski Homosassa, Florida Computer vs. Pen-and-ink This is a response to [Bob Hunt's] July column. I share some of [his| feelings about progress. I have some additional comments that I think you might find interesting. I have been an AutoCAD professional for twelve years and have taught it for over two years. I am one of the "new wave" that learned to draft on the computer. I did have some manual drafting classes in high school and college, but I never really got that good at it. I am in awe of people like Mr. Sweitzer. I built an MK Aurora a couple of years ago and Mr. Kato's magnificent drawings still hang on my workshop wall. You used the phrase "a new paradigm." I myself have written several memos internally at the institution I teach at that deal with the ongoing paradigm shift in technical graphics. When I first learned AutoCAD, it was at release 10. The institution I was attending had the latest state of the art equipment: IBM 386 computers with math coprocessor chips and a whopping eight megabytes of RAM! The paradigm at that time was to use the computer as a digital drawing board. Instead of pencil, pen, and compass, we had the digitizer and the mouse. Many of the techniques of manual drafting were being adapted to the computer. We were lofting, scaling, and drawing isometric and perspective views. Now the computers are faster and more powerful and the 3D tasks that earlier CAD programs struggled with are now a piece of cake. The way the paradigm is shifting is away from the old model of making drawings of all of the parts of an assembly, then checking them against one another for fit and function, then redlining and then revising and doing it again. Oh brother. The paradigm is shifting toward creating virtual machines in 3D using parametric modeling software like Autodesk Mechanical Desktop. Solid Works, or PRO-E. Once a device has been built and tested in the computer, production line drawings, isometric assembly drawings, etc. can be extracted very quickly. There is some resistance to change. We still teach manual drafting here, and when I cover isometric and perspective drawing it is almost all done manually on the drawing board. I know of one instructor who assigns up to five isometric drawings to be done on the computer. This is like having Newton balance your checkbook. I still assign one simple isometric on the computer so that the students are familiar with the AutoCAD functions. I do it only because I realize that there might be a bad businessman out there that might actually pay someone to do isometric drawings on a computer. I still build my own models, admittedly mostly from kits. I do some scratch building and made a fiberglass cowl for my Goldberg Ultimate. I am currently working on a plug for the fuselage of a 60-inch Sukhoi. I scanned a three-view published in Model Aviation. I inserted the raster image into AutoCAD then traced over it and scaled it to a 60-inch wingspan. Then I created a 3D surface model and extracted the shapes of the formers to build the plug. If it comes out well I plan to build a 72-inch version. The CAD drawings for the larger airplane will take about ten seconds. David Saenz S\lmar, California First I must say that I really enjoy your ["Modeling Spoken Here"] column. Over the years that you have been writing this column I have developed the need to go to your column first when I get my monthly edition of MA. I appreciate your "grass roots" observations of our sport as it progresses with each new generation of modelers. Two of your columns really touched a chord and got me thinking. The one on the guy who got bored with the hobby was interesting. One aspect that came to mind there was that sometimes what appears to be boredom is really burnout. Some people reach it sooner than others. Since I have turned my hobby into a business (Vailly Aviation) on a part time basis I have come across this many times over the last few years. I have found that all the phone calls from guys asking the same question has kind of taken the fun out of things. Couple this with a bunch of different areas of questions and the "problem" gets multiplied. I also have found that while doing things for other people there has always been one of my own models that has suffered. There has been many a night after a full day's work at my "day" job that 1 have spent the whole night running prints and packing boxes to ship, etc. While in the shop doing this there is usually a model 1 am working on that is sitting on the table staring at me and crying out for some attention. As the days drift by and this model just sits there 1 get more and more frustrated. It is in these moments I ask myself why I am in the hobby. Just like most other designer types I enjoy the creative side of it. But then the business side sets in and the menial tasks sometimes take over. This causes a loss of enthusiasm for sure. So much so that in some cases I have stopped going to fly-ins and contests just so I can stay away from all the questions. I'd rather spend the afternoon with my buddies at our own field and simply enjoy the day. How does one cope with "burnout"? Tough question that sometimes needs drastic answers. I have chosen to get back into car restoration. Here is a hobby I can do by myself in the peace and quiet of the garage where no one knows me. Don't get me wrong, I still model a lot and I still run the business and I still go to contests, but not like I used to. The hobby has become too much like work and the enjoyment has been watered down a bit. I know I'll get back to it sometime soon as I have been modeling for over 45 years now. But for now I feel I need a vacation from the "public." I often wonder if other top designers have experienced the same thing. Your other article that was very interesting was the latest on hand drawn vs. CAD generated plans. I draw all my model plans by hand. I love the feel of the pencil as it "lays down lead." It is almost like you can feel the creative juices flowing from your brain down your arm and out the pencil. I love to draw. I also like to put my own personality into the drawing too. CAD drawings have no personality. They are relatively "cold." Now don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with CAD when used in the right places and context. In my "day" job I head up a design group where we use a variety of CAD packages. We do all sorts of mechanical, electrical, and optical designs on some really high powered CAD systems. We use many different systems depending on the task at hand. But one thing I have seen in the 30+ years I'm in the aerospace industry is that the new wave of CAD designers have very little experience as to how to make a part. With this lack of experience come very difficult designs. Almost unmakable sometimes. These CAD guys also have no "feel" for sizes as everything is just an image on the screen. A "pen and ink" guy has the advantage of seeing things in the proper scale. He "feels" the design. I am constantly amazed at some of the comments from my designers when I show them a finished part in the flesh. They all say "so that is what it looks like." "Didn't you design this thing?" I ask. "Yea. but I wasn't sure how big it would be" is the response I get. Scary. This is a long time problem in our industry today. Periodically I run some courses to show the guys how to "design for manufacturing" and even do some old manual drafting techniques just to show them the roots of the industry. Seems there will be fewer and fewer hand drawn designs coming our way. But me. I'll continue to "spread lead" the "old fashioned" way. It's more fun. MA