AutoCAD

by Peter Jonnes

A few years ago Grandpa become enamored with Greek Triremes. He had built one or two from very basic blueprints and plans he had pieced together online. We had gotten into a few discussions about them, (when I say discussion I mean he talked and I listened at great length), but he would always complain about the lack of Trireme model kits. He had been building the wooden sailing ships for years which came in full kits with all the necessary parts, materials and designs, but kits like that did not exist for the Greek Trireme.

During one of my summer visits, he proudly marched me down to his workshop and showed me a large hand-drawn blueprint of a Trireme ship he had created and used to build his last ship. While going into great detail about the ship and his design, we found ourselves sitting at the kitchen dining table, and he announced that he was going to create his own kit based on his blueprint. All he needed to do was to recreate the blueprint in digital form so that it was to scale, with dimensions and multiple views from different angles so builders could follow it like one of his ship models. To do all this, he decided to use AutoCAD, which he had determined through extensive online research was his best option.

He proceeded described his strategy to produce blueprints and 3d renderings in AutoCAD and work with a ship model company to produce the kit. Meanwhile, Grandma who was cooking something up behind him, had obviously heard this plan before, stood leaning against the counter, spatula in hand, head slightly titled downward, eyes looking at me, was ever so slightly slowly shaking her head. Now finished describing his plan, Grandpa leaned towards me with big eyes and an excited smile as he awaited my reply. With the spotlight now on me, I moved my gaze from Grandma back to Grandpa and paused to process everything. Finally I asked, with genuine curiosity, “Do you know how to use AutoCAD?”

A quick note for those of you who don’t know, AutoCAD is the software for Engineers and Architects. It is an exceedingly large and complex program that takes years to master. The base price is around $5,000 with dozens of add-ons for various engineering and architectural functions which can add thousands of dollars. Not least of which, there was no chance that his computer could even run the program as it would almost certainly catch fire trying to run such a resource intense program. I took 2 years of AutoCAD in high school and had an internship at an Engineering firm using it so I was quite familiar with AutoCAD, to think that Grandpa knew how to use it really blew my mind.

His smile disappeared and his face instantly changed to a look of bewilderment, which I can only describe as the look someone gets when they think to themselves, What does that matter? He replied, taken aback, “well no, but I’ll teach myself”. Merely a trivial part of the overall plan as he saw it.

A brilliant man with grand ideas to be sure, when he was passionate about something he had a sort of delusional excitement that was very endearing. Of course, that excitement could cause him to overlook some of the more basic details occasionally.