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Nice table & setup projectnut! Yes, my arm is upside down on account of the table being a street sign just leaning against the wall. When I do get around to making a proper tilt mechanism, I'll have the option to put the arm on right side up. I too am left handed. I've grown to like having this orientation.
 
Drafting table for grins.
Here's a picture of my board and machine:

I love those!

I bet anyone of us could sit down at it and immediately know how to draw something!
No going to a cad software publishers site and looking for a how to PDF document or on-line forum to ask a question.
No youtube videos required for training.
No trying to remember which friggin menu path a certain command is buried in.
No having to remember which cryptic little icon someone dreamed up for a particular function.

......and best, the manufacturer cannot force you into a yearly subscription fee or shuffle all the menus/features with a new update!

I guess my age is showing.....or maybe just my Fusion-360 frustration!

Ignore me, carry on.

-brino
 
I got one of the old really nice huge draftsman tables from the engineering dept at work. Most of them they just stuck outside when pc’s came in. The most sad was a hydraulic lift table that would go from a desk the standing height. It got set outside and all the internals were junk. Never did find out what happened to all the machines, probably in the scrap bin.

I sometimes wish I had that table but I can’t justify the room and as like all flat surfaces in the shop it would be covered in unorganized orphans inside of 5min. It’s why I limit myself to my welding table/hydraulic lift and my other portable workstation table. I HAVE to keep them clean or I don’t have anyplace to work!
 
Is it just me, or is your drafting machine upside down? I have the same machine on a 38" x 72" table. I would find it difficult to work around the horizontal track and machine if it were in the same position as yours. For the record I'm left handed. I just learned to draw with the machine in the opposite orientation.

Here's a picture of my board and machine:
yep, looks upside down, but maybe he is a leftie, and the gantry is in the way.
 
This is why I have a stack of graph paper tablets out in the shop. One 3/4 view with dimensions tells me everything in just a few minutes.

Oh, but of course C-Bag! Only mine is a stack of IBM print paper gathered from my job in 1985. We were so wasteful in those days. Every print job included a blank page at the beginning & at the end just to account for the track feed. You might remember it; it's green & white bands each a measured 1" tall. I amassed about a 4' tall stack of this triplicate (plus carbon paper) trash LOL!!! Price was right.

Now my drafting paper is a similar story. It's 'C' sized Blueprint paper, a whole 200 pages still in the light sensitive package that somehow got exposed - or degradated due to age. Once I'm told to throw it away .......... it's fare game! Only thing is that after 41 years it's fragile :-(
 
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Mine all date from the mid ‘90’s when I was working as a fabricator in two different packing houses. The first one I cleaned and modded the whole house and put in cat walks and a control room. I did all the ordering from a metal supply so I got to be good friends with the divers. That company was smart, they didn’t just give out calendars once a year, they gave out graph paper tablets in two sizes with every order I did. So I grabbed them. I did that whole packing house layout on those tablets freehand. Mostly just notes so I could wrap my head around how much and what sizes I needed. There was next to zero waste.

The second house the maintenance dept did the ordering so I raided their stash because nobody there needed them.

I ended up at one of the manufacturers making the equipment used in those packing houses and used a bunch of those tablets to do design updates. Those went directly to the fab dept and that got me thinking how to tell them exactly what I wanted on one piece of paper. Making clear drawings for others is the best way to hone your drawing skills.

At that time the engineering dept was a mess as they had been trying to implement this huge program that had been an ongoing project for over 5yrs and was obsolete and another guy was wanting to do the exact same thing in Excel. Generating huge sheets of plans that meant nothing and most of the clowns on the floor didn’t pay attention to anyway. So the guys in fab used to laugh at me when I’d give them a small piece of graph paper and say I need these parts. We got it done though.
 
I have my dad's old portable drafting table, should break it out and start learning how to draw.

But, I also have a CNC project mill needing finished too....

John
 
C-Bag wrote: "... At that time the engineering dept was a mess as they had been trying to implement this huge program that had been an ongoing project for over 5yrs and was obsolete and another guy was wanting to do the exact same thing in Excel. Generating huge sheets of plans that meant nothing and most of the clowns on the floor didn’t pay attention to anyway. So the guys in fab used to laugh at me when I’d give them a small piece of graph paper and say I need these parts. We got it done though."

Yeah we would mark up our engineering prints in red to show corrections. It was referred to as bleeding on it. LOL. One day some bigwig walks in on me as I'm studying prints n checking my work. This was my 1st 'green' station complete start over upgrade where I was in charge of & responsible for everything. He didn't introduce himself or even say hello. He looked at all my bleeding on the print & started with, "So, you've decided to redesign the whole thing?" Them's fighting words to me even if coming from a stranger. My response? No Sir. I don't have time for that. However, if you compare this page you are looking at to others referring to this same system you will see that the DC+ & DC- are directly tied to each other & I didn't see how that would work. I lit into a long list of similar issues that I had to overcome. By the 1/2 hour mark he is trying to crawfish out the door. So I corralled him back behind the panels with another 30 minutes of errors. I felt he was whipped on enough & it was evident he was not going to be of any use with solutions. So I ended with. "That's another hour closer to the deadline & nothing accomplished. He didn't even say Bye when he left.

Another humorous moment. An engineer on an 8 phase project got the whole order of operations completely backwards. It fell on me to implement his plans in reverse order. This was a big year long project. At 1 point in the conversion, the plan included using the DC+ of 1 source & returning it to the DC- of a different source. An easy fix really. But, I couldn't help but call the engineer. I can hear him flipping through schematics & in a quiet voice saying, "Oh $h*t, Oh $h*t, Oh $h*t, Oh $h*t, Oh $h*t." I had heart & asked if he was ready to hear the solution! When he heard that he was spared having to solve the issue, I could almost hear him looking up & saying Thank You to our God above!
 
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