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Learned a trick for reading old blueprints from a retired drafter at a coffee shop
He showed me how they used to shade areas with crosshatching that I'd been misreading as annotations for months. Has anyone else run into weird symbols on vintage prints that threw you off?
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piper_flores6927d agoTop Commenter
and that crosshatching thing trips people up all the time because it looks so similar to actual notes if you're not used to it. i've seen guys mistake those shaded areas for dimensions before and it throws off whole projects.
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Oh man, I gotta push back on that a little. @piper_flores69 I see what you're saying but honestly those crosshatch marks are way more clear than a lot of modern stuff I've seen. Old drafters spent years perfecting that style and it was meant to be read a certain way. If someone mistakes it for dimensions then maybe they just need more time with the prints instead of blaming the system. Those shading patterns were standard for decades and they worked fine for generations of builders. I'd take a vintage blueprint with good crosshatching over some messy modern CAD drawing any day.
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