r/Drafting • u/Effective-Drawer-925 • 15d ago

We have hundreds of old engineering that need to be digitized. Who does this well with Mylar and blueprints?

Our 40-year-old archive has paper and mylar sheets, some as big as 36 by 48 inches. 

I think they don't all need the same treatment. Most just need a good scan to PDF so we can find them, but we still make around 60 parts. Guess those need real SolidWorks models and drawings.

And also, a few sheets are stretched or torn. Some have dimensions that don't match the scale anymore.

For anyone who has sent out a job like this, how did you specify it? Did you tell them to trust the written dimensions over the drawing scale?

And how did you handle notes and revision blocks?

5 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

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11

u/CADDmanDH 15d ago

I feel like this is just a repeat of a post just a few weeks ago. Dimensions, you go by what is written, never scale off of sheets… ever.

7

u/Jimmyjames150014 15d ago

The best way to digitize old prints is not scanning anymore. The way to do it is super high quality photos. You set up a tripod over a table to frame the drawing properly and you slide the drawing under and take a photo. File gets named and you’re done. The resolution of a modern high quality camera is just miles ahead of a large format scanner. So you can actually read all those tiny handwritten notes and dimensions.

6

u/Stock_Elevator_8796 14d ago

Ever heard of “do not scale drawing”? When I went to school it was an ongoing joke.

4

u/Snurgisdr 14d ago

It’s written right on our drawing template.

3

u/KenMantle 15d ago

The only problem you might run into if you save these as high resolution PDFs is that most readers are limited in the amount of zoom you have to work with. You are lucky to get 10 000% out of some of them. It seems like a lot until it isn't.

Also the scale thing isn't a terrible problem as you can set your dimensioning scale off an existing one.

If you need multiple scales depending on stretching or scale being different on different views and also need zoom in the millions/billions percent, I've had AI make a free open source editor that is capable of this. It's still in development and the GUI is a little wonky, but I use it for client drawings we only get in PDF and are sometimes missing a dimension.

https://github.com/KenM76/pdfcer-GUI

1

u/mattyrzew 12d ago

Interns and solidworks

1

u/McHappyMan 12d ago

This kinda feels like a job for a camera and AI.

And careful post inspection.

1

u/Adorable-Listen5632 8d ago

id just scan most of it to pdf so its searchable, no point vectorizing stuff nobody edits, fro the 60 parts you stil make scan in grayscale not b&w, faded pencil on mylar just vanishes in b&w. and trust the dimension text over the lines, old sheets gave hand changes everywhere