Tec drawing

sd123

my teacher's wrecking our heads saying how important presentation is and says that there's no way you can get an A without good presentation, no matter how good your answer is. is this true. i think its a load of rubbish cos ive seen the marking schemes and there sometimes might be 1 or 2 out of 50 for presentation. Other things he says is like about using colour to highlight things and to make sure projection lines are invisible. but the making schemes says nothing bout this and the C.E.R 2005 said that examiners got it hard to see projection lines. anyway i think if everything's right you should get an A1. anyone else know?

Citizen_Erased

The aul tech drawing seems a minority these days but at least the new course coming in will help it out more.

As for the questions yes you can get marked for presentation but presentation falls under many headings. The actual lining out of the sheet rarely affects the mark so long as it has all the necessary info but it is possible to get mark down for it. But a simple lined box in the bottom left corner usually suffices and to the best of my knowledge borders are not a requirement but they never hurt.

As for the general appearance of your drawing , yes it matters a lot , lines should be appropriately dotted or heavy or whatever and generally should not be messy and confused. So just keep it simple and clean cut. Colours can help to and you may aswell use them like in road works questions to make the contrast between cut and fill and wee things like that that add to the appearance.

Construction lines should be looked on in a similar way to the "working out" of a math question so there is no gray area as to what exactly you have done and in the case of a mistake , so that marks can be awarded according to your attempts. With no construction lines its like sticking down a straight answer in maths.

But if you are an A student in this subject then the necessary levels of presentation should come naturally to you anyways and a little care and patience goes a long way.

Good Luck in your exam , after all we are the last of the true technical drawers (**Cue Patriotic Music**)

C_E

Fuzzy_Dunlop

I'm never really to concerned about it because my presentation generally isn't too bad but i think there's a good few marks going for it in one or two questions, upwards of 20 i seem to remember. I assume it was something like perspective. But you're right from what i can see most questions don't specify too many marks for it

JC 2K3

Apparently in the next few years they'll be phasing this out and replacing it with CAD.

spurious

JC 2K3 wrote:

Apparently in the next few years they'll be phasing this out and replacing it with CAD.

Not unless they spend an awful lot of money they won't.

They've been talking about this since the introduction of the Junior Cert., but only in that way they do when they have no idea what exactly goes on in schools and what equipment people have access to.

Jello

The new syllabus will be examined first in 2009 and apparently it's a lot more CAD based.

Citizen_Erased

Yeap the new course will be started by 5th years next year and does include a lot of cad and also is a lot more orientated towards architecture . There will actually also be a project that will involve studying buildings etc and there will also be theory involved. They barely touch on most of the actual advanced drawing though that we do in our current course so it really is a complete overhaul.

ZorbaTehZ

sd123 wrote:

my teacher's wrecking our heads saying how important presentation is and says that there's no way you can get an A without good presentation, no matter how good your answer is. is this true. i think its a load of rubbish cos ive seen the marking schemes and there sometimes might be 1 or 2 out of 50 for presentation. Other things he says is like about using colour to highlight things and to make sure projection lines are invisible. but the making schemes says nothing bout this and the C.E.R 2005 said that examiners got it hard to see projection lines. anyway i think if everything's right you should get an A1. anyone else know?

I've never heard of using colours to highlight lines and tbh I'd stay away from them. However as Citizen mentioned, you may possibly get away with it in the roadworks questions.

If your teacher said to make projection lines invisible then he is an idiot imo. Again like Citizen said they're just like a maths question in the way that the method is equally important as the end result - possibly more so. You say you're looking at the marking schemes and you can see from them how they are marked and that all the construction is important.

More generally, presentation is of the utmost importance in TD especially if you're aiming for an A1. Thinks (that should seem obvious) like always keeping a very pointed tip on your pencil, always keeping you're triangles vertical (so table dust/dirt doesn't gather on them), a straight t-square with no chips, smooth unchipped board, a proper rubber that doesn't mark the page etc. is what you should be thinking about.

timmywex

this is the last year of the current tech drawing course, its being scraped after the current fifth years sit their exams in 2008 and a new one called design and communications graphics is coming in, it only has one 3 hour paper and a 40%project you hand up, it uses a lot more CAD and also a content reduced course, it will be examined in 2009

sd123

yea he is an idiot. we only have 5 questions done on each paper, its bloody ridiculous. so, in summary construction lines should be very faint, but visible while the answer is very clear and sharp?what bout small things like finding dihedral angle, should it be measured or just highlighted as A. what bout splitting a line eg 50 mm long into 6 equal parts, he said just use a calculator and get each like 8.333 mm long and get it roughly. is that ok or should the proper construction be done?

Citizen_Erased

God no , don't ever divide a line like that ... hold for diagram.

As for the dihedral angle etc , when all your work is down and the actually infront of you on the page , you don't measure it you just indicate which angle on the sheet it with an arrow and label.

Hope this works , the sliding set-square method is useful here...

sebastianlieken

citizen_erased is absolutly right about that NEVER EVER EVER EVER use a calculater in a drawing exam! its tech drawing...not 'how to use a calculator class'.. tell ur teacher (for me) that hes a foolish fool!!

i should probably state for the record i did the L.C. last year ('06) so my knoledge is nice n up to date.

as for page set up and that malarkey, (i feel like im gonna impose some bad habits on you here...but the truth must be shouted out). i didnt line out a single one of my pages with a border or a title block...not one, and i still came out with my A1. just be neat and tidy, use as much of the sheet as you can, SHOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING (i.e. clear construction lines), and when you are told to find the dihedral angle or those other things in mining or anything else, all you have to do is indicate in clear writing what it is you have found (i.e. an arrow pointing to whatever, and 'DIHEDRAL ANGLE'

Fuzzy_Dunlop

Thats good about there being no need for title blocks etc. cos tbh in an exam i couldn't be arsed wasting my time doing all that. Just one question actually, for when you're getting a tangent between 2 cones in plan lets say when getting a horizontal trace or summit, do you have to do the full construction for the tangent or just draw the gist of it by eye?

Citizen_Erased

I didn't quite understand your question , traces and the like aren't my strong point , but I'm pretty sure there is no room in technical drawing for guesswork and all sections of a question leading to a common answer need equal attention. If you are struggling to figure out something but want to continue on with the question then it may be acceptable. Or if what your on about is somesorta free hand curve then at least 4 points would make for a nice curve. Excuse me if I have missed the point of your question altogether here.

sebastianlieken

the most important thing is to show the examiner that you know what you are doing. show everything that is relevant.

in the case of your solids question, bring your construction lines down from elevation, scribe the necessary arcs, and draw your tangent...think that might answer ur question (i didnt rely understand ur question all too well)

but the main point is, show how you arived at every point! its like a maths question...you dont just right down the answer, you show how you got it.

ZorbaTehZ

My god SD123 your teacher sounds like my own physics teacher absolutely clueless when it comes to their subject. Jesus, he actually said to use a calculator? Sliding scale method is elementary and taught at JC level.
Another option for the method is just to draw a long line and then use your compass with a set length and mark in X amount, whatever length to divide the line in.

Playa3, estimating traces will get you no marks, as will estimating anything tbh in the test.
However you do realise that if you are getting the traces of a plane that is a tangent to two cones then it's horizontal trace can simply be drawn as a tangent to the circles of the bases in the plan view? (provided their bases lie on the horizontal)

sebastianlieken

this is true actually about the cones...dont know how i missed that part..(guess i jus have it embedded in my skull to deal with a cone and a sphere..........which by the way you more than likely will get in the exam)

sd123

no you're right bout the sliding set square method. we learned it for the jc but then my other teacher for lc said its a waste of time in the LC. another thing was like eg hyperbolic roof q in the mocks. the plan was of an elipse. could you just draw it freehand or was jc construction required?

sebastianlieken

you can do it free hand if you want to, but i was shown one of those french curve things about 10 seconds before the exam, and its so much faster and neater, i recommend you get yourself one

Raphael

You need to use either the jc way or a trammel to get points on the ellipse, then draw it wither freehand or with a flexicurve

Fuzzy_Dunlop

ZorbaTehZ wrote:

Playa3, estimating traces will get you no marks, as will estimating anything tbh in the test.
However you do realise that if you are getting the traces of a plane that is a tangent to two cones then it's horizontal trace can simply be drawn as a tangent to the circles of the bases in the plan view? (provided their bases lie on the horizontal)

Christ sorry about the confusion people i meant it like how you put it there, just for that tangent between the circles in plan if you need to do the full construction for the tangent or not

Cos88

I don't think presentation is that important at all.

I got an A1 last year, and I know I didn't get everything right, so I doubt they were docking much marks for presentation. Just use light lines for construction, dotted lines for hidden detail and normal lines for the drawing itself. No need to bother with borders or anything.

ZorbaTehZ

playa3 wrote:

Christ sorry about the confusion people i meant it like how you put it there, just for that tangent between the circles in plan if you need to do the full construction for the tangent or not

That is a good point actually, and I don't know the answer. Personally I always estimate - we were shown how to do the construction but only really as a concept. In any test I've ever down I don't think that I've lost marks for estimating but it's a gray area.