Free CAD

[Yorkie]

I've trawled through my e-mails to see if I still had the original from my chum who designed the front panel for the Bygones Wobublator based on the original dial, but modified to incorporate a sawtooth generatior for the scope timebase. I found the e-mail (August 2009) so have solved the mystery. He did indeed use Powerpoint to create the artwork, and wrote to me thus:

The original artwork isn’t very good quality and I also needed to make some changes, so I took the [front panel] artwork from theRadio Bygones article and used it as a basis for a new panel that I put together using MS Powerpoint! I know it’s not meant for this sort of thing, but I can drive it, and it does what I need. Each dial was put together line by line so it was very tedious. I built up a small library of images for each dial and then simply positioned them on the final panel. The images are .TIFF format so you could use MS Paint or any other drawing package to put together a final panel layout for yourself.

I think with all these things Gary - your own dials as published in the Bulletin for example - when we see the finished item, it doesn't convey any idea to those who aren't 'CAD literate' just how much time and effort goes into creating the artwork.

If we see a solid object - a chair, or homebrew radio, we may not know how it was put together or quite how much time and skill went into it, but we can guess that it was considerable. But a radio dial? Only when we start to grasp some of the basics of the software can we truly marvel at what's been achieved.

If we hark back to the 30s - 60s, the designers of dials, and the makers, had none of the benefits of software packages yet created some wonderful screen printed dials. In some cases they proved durable - in others, not so, with the paint flaking of as dust. Those with water-slide transfers seem to have fared the best.