(21) Design draftsman’s job (1/6).

In July1969 I was told by a friend (thank you, the late George Hanzalek) that the car maker General Motors-Holden's is looking for draftsmen. It’s a profession I have never been interested in, and I have never been interested in cars either; long time before, at the high school, I used to get the worst marks in subjects such as geometry and technical drawings. After graduation I worked as an aircraft mechanic, land surveyor, labourer, flight instructor and air traffic controller. Immediately prior to the General Motors job I was washing crop dusting airplanes at the Moorabbin airport.

During interview at GM I was asked a few general questions by the Chief Draftsman John Carr, given a few half-completed geometric sketches to finish and half an hour later I was sent home to wait for an answer. A few days later he rang and told me that I could start next Monday.

For the first few months I worked as a detail draftsman. The work consisted of drawing car components from sketches supplied by design draftsmen, or by engineers. The components were mostly screws, nuts, brackets, cog wheels, cast iron parts of engines, etc. We were drawing on plastic "mylar" sheets using pencils, rulers, protractors, compasses, erasers and similar tools; it being 1969 the graphic computers were at least 15 years in the future.

It has taken at least a year for me to learn various tricks of trade: drafting technique as practised by the GM, the office culture and hierarchy (there were some 150 of us in one large room), relationship between various offices, workshops, etc. After a year or two I was promoted to the position of design draftsman, and the tedious job became a tad more interesting. This time it consisted of sketching parts of a car according to the requirements of the car modellers, the people who were sculpting the future car using wooden skeletons covered in clay. Sometimes I worked from their free-hand sketches, sometimes even from their bits of clay shaped in the form of the future part, sometimes from mere verbal explanations. My job was to translate these loose bits of information into technical information for use by the experimental workshop, by parts manufacturers and, eventually, by detail draftsmen. My masterpiece from those days was design of the instrument panel for the vehicle called LH Torana. Design of these mechanical parts was not exactly my kettle of fish, for I was more drawn to the electrical systems. I asked the chief design draftsman for transfer to the electrical section. To my surprise I was told that the electrical drafting pool consists of detail draftsmen only, that there is no design draftsman among them. And he added that there is not much electricity in these vehicles anyway. Hm, hmm and hmmm…

      I decided to take closer look at the electrical system of cars I was working on. At the time the car’s electrical system was fairly simple. It consisted of some electricity around the engine, starter, alternator, battery, front and rear lamps, instruments and a few lights and switches in the cabin. All these components were interconnected by a network of cables that were in the way of everybody who had anything to do with the cars. For that reason, the cables were suffering under unflattering names, spaghetti, octopuses, etc. One exception were battery cables that lived under their proper names. Their bulk and rigidity resembled mechanical parts, and their willingness to spark and even turn red hot when mishandled were respected by all.

    A year or two later, due to a spike in the workload, I was given a chance to assist the electrical section. Out of the blue I was given a job of preparing drawing of wiring for manufacture of a new car. It happened simply: an electrical engineer dropped a heap of “spaghetti” on my desk with the words that "manufacturing drawings are required by such and such time". The engineer was working according to the time-honoured method. “Spaghetti”, taken from a similar car which was already in production, were installed in the body of the car being prepared. Where they were long, they were trimmed to suit, where they were short bits were added. Results were given to the mechanics in the experimental workshop for beautification, and eventually to draftsmen to translate into production drawings.

    Having absolutely no idea what to do I embedded myself next to one of the draftsmen in the electrical section, who was glumly looking at a similar heap of spaghetti in front of himself. He was a spaghetti veteran, and with his help (thank you, Wolfgang Christel!) I managed to produce sketches that were converted into production drawings by a young draftsman.

    A copy of his drawings was used by another draftsman whose job it was to prepare electrical wiring diagrams for publication in service manuals. This is the result of his work in this case it is schematics of the electrical interconnections in the front part of the car:

     Following this excursion into the electrical section I returned back to my desk and continued with mechanical design work. The electrical experience, however, was bugging me: why was such a complex electrical job given to me, considering my absolute lack of any experience in that field? The explanation supplied by my section leader did not satisfy me: in this office everybody is expected to do everything…