Coastal Vectors

Technical Drawings

When I was pretty young, my dad was working at a start-up with relatively few employees; maybe twenty or so. I used to go in and help with odd jobs. It started with assembling workbenches, pulling CAT5 cable and graduated on to mechanical assembly and packaging of products. Along the way I learned other skills too, like soldering, debugging, and illustration.

I grew up with exposure to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Because of this exposure, I was asked to create an assembly drawing of our product. I had never done anything that complex before. I was sat down in an office with a computer running Adobe Illustrator, along with the assembly that needed to be drawn. I was pretty familiar with the part since I had assembled hundreds of them before. I worked for a full day (maybe more, I don’t remember since it was so long ago) and I created my first technical drawing.

I found that I enjoyed working in this style. Even today, I’m pretty pleased with how my first foray turned out.

Over the years I’ve had a few occasions to do this type of work, but not as often as I might prefer. When my family was involved with the Darpa Grand Challenge, I made some illustrations of the car, Golem 3.

During my education I had numerous times when I was able to make use of this type of drawing for research papers and reports. In my internship, I created assembly instructions for mechanical arrowheads which relied heavily on technical drawings.

Assortment of product diagrams used in assembly instructions

Presently my full-time job description does not include this type of work, but I have found occasions when it became necessary to create drawings. For example, the user manual for the software I am working on needed diagrams to illustrate connection of the hardware with which our software operates. I took it upon myself to provide the artwork. It was a nice break from the routine.

In diagrams, it’s important to use visual cues to convey orientation and differentiate parts. It’s equally as important to reduce extraneous features in order remove visual noise and not distract the viewer. Finding that balance of conveying enough, but not too much, visual information is very rewarding.

I also like the freedom of working with fewer colors. In many instances, these types of drawing will be printed in black and white, and even when drawings can be viewed in color, it’s best to leave them less saturated as to not distract and draw the eye of the viewer to unimportant details.

Doing this type of work is very relaxing for me.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is one of my favorite movies. I watched it repeatedly as a child. My favorite thing in the movie was the iconic Nautilus. The Nautilus was designed by Harper Goff for Disney’s 1954 film. I love the mixture of organic and mechanical design. Even as a child, I thought the submarine was pure beauty.

I’ve attempted many times to capture it’s likeness in drawing. I’m not much of an artist, but I think you can tell what the subject matter is.

I finally decided to purchase a model. I found a highly detailed model from Masterpiece Models for $100. It’s a 16 inch model based off the reproduction fabricated by Scott Brodeen. In the Nautilus community, his is a well-known name. He researched and created master models that are the most accurate reproductions available, going as far as to place all of the thousands of rivets as accurately as possible.

The kit was pretty good. I had a few issues with it as I went. As is common with models, there was a lot of flashing that had to be removed. This is a solid resin casting, and not hollow, so there is some heft to it. A few of the mold lines didn’t seems to be lined up correctly which made some of the smaller pieces less uniform that I would have liked. Specifically, the upper part of the nose, and the support struts for the rear rotor cover.

On the main body, there were some defects. The front of the nose was actually missing. It looks like when they filled the mold with resin (from the tail) the resin never reached all the way to the nose, or there was a large amount of air trapped there. I got some plastic and turned it down to an acceptable approximation and glued it on to the front. Some of the rivets also had bubble problems.

After doing the clean-up and most of the assembly, I did a light primer coat of black.

The interior of the wheelhouse I did a clean steel color. I deviated from what the instructions suggested for colors, and did my own based on memories of watching the movie. The wheel and wheel column are gold.

The lights I painted a mixture of yellow and gold paint.

The remainder was painted using a Modern Master’s Reactive Iron Paint that contains ferrous particles that oxidize using an activator containing acid. Following the instructions, I brushed on two coats of the paint. It comes out as a flat, almost gun-metal grey. A tad darker perhaps.

The magic happens when you apply the activator. I re-purposed a small spray pump that had contained eye-glass cleaning solution. I sprayed it on fairly generously, and then let it sit for 5 minutes. I then applied heat from a hair dryer. You can see the how quickly this take effect form the time lapse footage.

Once everything was painted, I had to apply the bubble domes to the lights and windows. The domes (4) were created using vaccuform, and unfortunately were a bit too large for the openings on the resin model. I ended up using a heat gun to soften the domes in order to place them. Once placed, I tacked them in with super glue.

The lights also needed clear bubble coverings. The kit came with 2 different sizes of googly-eyes. The eyes needed to have the backing removed. I kept dropping them, and they are incredibly hard to see. They too were pretty close in size, but there were a few that didn’t fit as well as I would have liked. I use super glue to place these. Of the entire model, I am most disappointed with how well I executed these, however they are a small enough detail that I think it looks okay from a normal viewing distance.

I assembled the remaining components; Hull, wheel-house covering, upper nose, and observation window structures.

I now have my own recreation of the Nautilus that I can enjoy.

Making USB Bootable Windows 10 Installer

I needed to update some servers to Windows 10/2016 at work this week, but didn’t have any DVDs large enough to accommodate the 5.8 GB size of the Windows ISO. Normal DVD+Rs are 4.7 GB, so to make use of the ISO I downloaded from MSDN, one needs a DVD-R DL which can hold 8.5 GB of data.

I didn’t feel like going to a store or waiting for delivery, so I used Microsoft’s “Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool” (seemingly misnamed since it supports windows 7 and newer).

Once downloaded, the tool is fairly straight forward. You point it to an ISO, and then to a USB drive, and voila, it copies the data.

The annoyance is that I got the error “We were unable to copy your files. Please check your USB device and the selected ISO file and try again.” Trying again, of course, did not resolve the issue.

Fortunately, someone knowledgeable was able to explain the root cause of the error. The USB’s MBR needs to be cleared. This doesn’t happen automatically with the Windows Download Tool.

To clear the MBR and format the drive, follow these steps using the diskpart tool:

diskpart
diskpart> list disk
diskpart> select disk #
diskpart> clean
diskpart> create partition primary
diskpart> select partition 1
diskpart> active
diskpart> format quick fs=fat32
diskpart> assign
diskpart> exit

This resolved my issue and I was able to go along my merry way.

I don’t use Windows a lot in my every-day life, but it is something I use quite a bit at work. Documenting little things like this helps me to remember tricks I come across, and hopefully can help other people searching for solutions to similar problems.