Drafting Supplies
Drafting; not too long ago, the word conjured up images of short sleeved, tie wearing draftsmen sitting on high stools in front of an angled drawing table, marking large sheets of paper with blue pencils and using oddly shaped rulers and mechanical measuring devices to create accurately proportional drawings of homes and office buildings. These days the term could just as easily mean casually dressed men and women sitting in front of a large computer screen, deftly using their mouse and keyboard shortcuts to create multiple layers in a computer aided drafting software program, using a vast knowledge of scale and paper-space to create hundred room blue prints for call centers and restaurants in fraction of the time it would take to do so by hand. Both forms of drafting are still done today, although drafting by hand had been eclipsed by the computer aided variety, which has less of a barrier to entry and dependency on being able to draw a straight line. In either case, a drafter can't create construction documents and blue prints without supplies of one kind or another.Manual Drafting Supplies
Performing manual drafting may seem like a lost art these days, but there are plenty of places to find the supplies to perform it if that is your style. Basic tools include compasses, used to create circles of various dimensions, not to mention parts of a circle, used for everything to draw the back of a chair to conference room table edge to the curvature in a roof. T-squares, L-squares and triangles are all used to create angles that are mathematically correct, and rules with a variety of scales are used to make an office building on graph paper as proportionally correct as the real thing.
Computer Aided Drafting Supplies
The biggest name in computer aided drafting programs is AutoCAD, the standard used in industries ranging from engineering to Interior Design to furniture design. The software program itself is one of the supplies needed to perform CAD (computer aided design) but there are certainly other items you may need. A plotting machine, along with the software to run it and the plotting paper itself, is needed if you want to print of your own set of Construction Documents, a set of papers several feet long and wide used to keep everyone from the architect to the contractor to the permitting department on the same page, not to mention the client who is paying for it all.
Even if you are solely a computer draftsperson, having a T-square on hand can be a lifesaver when you need to roughly draft some ideas before booting up your PC; either way, both kinds of drafters need the right supplies to get the job done.