I work with architects and engineers every day and have no idea what that is. Is it a scanner? Does it somehow change the 2D drawings into some sort of 3D rendering?
Not any old ones perhaps, we scrapped our entire darkroom in the 90's when we got our first 60" plotter and scanner. Dude, its a UV exposure table for Diazo prints. We used ours for making etchcoat film. What do you want, a list of all its features? OK, it has a vaccum hold down and it has an exposure timer like they all do. Perhaps this one hums very loud and your secretary likes to sit on it.
Yes Red, this machine has a vacuum feature. A vacuum feature is not needed for a blueprint machine. The vacuum was used to stack multiple tracings to make one. Many parts of a set of architectural building plans are redundant. For instance, a reflected ceiling plan (a standard detail in all new building construction plans) is nothing more than a copy of the floor plan with all of the details of the ceiling added to it. Things like light fixture placement, vent placement, etc. In the “old days”, all of the details of the reflected ceiling plan would have to be drawn, even though it shared much from the floor plan. In computerized drawings, you simply copy and paste. You can’t do that with tracings. So, how do you copy and paste a 24x36 inch tracing? The answer was to draw on synthetic, plasticized velum. The system used an indexing jig to keep all of the pages aligned. In our example of the RCP, you would put a clear piece of velum over the base floor plan and draw the details of the RCP. To make prints from it, you clamped these 2 sheets together along with your photosensitive sheet and put them in a vacuum press combined with a light table. The vacuum eliminated any wrinkles from one sheet to the next and enabled you to get a perfect copy from your layered tracings. From there you developed the newly exposed sheet in a separate machine that would give you a translucent print that you could use to make prints from in a standard blueprint machine.
No need to get snarky there Amigo. Had you mentioned anything about Diazo process earlier, we would know that you knew what it was. Glad to see your Google skills are working overtime.
Never split hairs when dealing with a smart-ass. I have only begun to snark. Diazo is a word most people don't know, but it is a UV contact exposure process by definition. I used one of these machines for 25 years, Snarky. Not everyone used them for pin-registered multiple exposures. We etched film negatives with them and made color proofs as well. We needed the vaccum feature to minimize any film distortion from entrapped air bubbles.
I agreed with you every time you took a step in the right direction. Next time I won't be so generous with the clues. I would assume that you would have known the vacuum feature and mentioned that when I showed the fans, since you used one for so long I gave you your props all along but nowhere in your first two answers did you mention what made this table different from a standard light table. It's ok, I don't mind leading y'all to the correct answer. Nevertheless, you win this one.
