Aero Vintage Books

Great Work! That sort of work is tedious but necessary!

Joe

Amazing. What a difference and a different perspective than normally seen on the airplane. Cool.

This really is impressive. But what I find more interesting is that the original was done by hand by some draftsman. Imagine doing all the drawings for a B-17 by hand! Rows and Rows of draftsmen at their tables laboring over one part at a time.

Looking at the drawing, I see a line that seems to indicate the break between the inboard and outboard wing panels. Is this really the seperation line or an artifact of the draftsman? Is there a large difference between the C/D model wings and the E and later wings?

Nice work Bill,
Bill K

partschaser wrote:Looking at the drawing, I see a line that seems to indicate the break between the inboard and outboard wing panels. Is this really the seperation line or an artifact of the draftsman? Is there a large difference between the C/D model wings and the E and later wings?

The C/D wing has structural differences (mostly material thickness),
but the planform is the same. The line between the inner and outer
panel is a little off in the drawing, but I kept it there to be true to the
original.

Just another quick glimpse at the slow moving B-17C project.

Bill E-mail me this drawing

Hi Bill, what was the process used to create the cleaned up clean drawing? Did you do it yourself or did others help you? Who is printing the super large sheet of the fuselage elevation for you? - thats expensive!
Sorry if you've written about this before, just post the link if its easier. I'm familiar with some of this clean up process using scanning, re-drawing and printing in my work as an architect.
Thanks, Chris Wilkinson

Hi Chris.

I'm using Photoshop to pull in the drawings, stitch them together,
clean/sharpen them up, and then redrawing them line by line in some cases.
I'm terrible with autoCAD, as I never had a class or a mentor to show me
how to draft parts, and in most cases, I'm recreating am assembly, and
not a single part.

A friend has access to a 36" paper roll plotter. Otherwise, it is quite expensive.

I'm in the sign business and we use a program that works similar to cad.
You may price out large format digital prints on vinyl, it's overkill, but it will be more durable and it can be used later for a cool display.

DryMartini wrote:Hi Chris.

I'm using Photoshop to pull in the drawings, stitch them together,
clean/sharpen them up, and then redrawing them line by line in some cases.
I'm terrible with autoCAD, as I never had a class or a mentor to show me
how to draft parts, and in most cases, I'm recreating am assembly, and
not a single part.

A friend has access to a 36" paper roll plotter. Otherwise, it is quite expensive.

Woof! thats a huge amount of work scanning, erasing and stitching. The file sizes must be astronomical. Boy, you need access to a large scanner. But if it works, don't fix it. I've used the same approach to save an old drawing, but added the step of importing the scanned sheet jpg into AutoCAD to trace it. If your project needs AutoCAD software or any assistance with the software send me a note.