No question about it. Practice is essential to mastering any skill. Fair joints take practice and care. Did you ever take mechanical drawing (drafting) in high school? When I was in high school in the sixties, it was one of those "easy A" courses for me. Boys took mechanical drawing and the girls took "home economics." I loved it. A few things were drummed into me and l haven't lost them. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. You have to be very neat, take your time and follow good procedure. (Wash hands frequently. Don't sharpen pencils over your board. Wipe your lead after sharpening. Clean the edges of your straightedges and curves frequently.
Use the proper eraser and brush your work after erasing. Put tape or "spacer dots" under your straightedge or curve when inking so the ink won't run under the template. And so on.
Erasing is part of the game. Unlike a lot of other uses for an eraser, their use in drafting isn't only about correcting mistakes. Your construction lines and so on are going to be erased. Little ticks and whatnot will be erased. You need the right paper (drafting vellum) and the right eraser. (The white vinyl ones Staedtler makes these days are great.) You also have to use the right lead. You want to do your drawing with a very hard lead (3H or 4H, some use harder) because it leaves little graphite on the work and is easily erased without smudging. Only when you have it all done like that, then you ink your final lines. Using the older ruling pens is an acquired skill, but technical pens (Koh-i-noor Rapidograph, etc.) are much easier to use and the newer porous tipped pens (Micron) are even easier, although their tips wear down rather quickly. (The different sized pens are for producing different weights of line, of course.)
There's a lot of fascinating fun to have playing with this stuff. You can get a new set of technical pens on eBay for maybe twenty bucks if you are lucky.
Or you can use a traditional ruling pen that comes with most older cased sets of drawing instruments or can be bought one-off:
They take a bit of practice to use, too, of course:
And for boats, where there will be a lot of curves to draw, you'd need an old fashioned pen specially designed to draw curves (yep... one for lines and one for curves.)
The head of the curve pen swivels and the nib is curved, so as you draw, it follows the curve. This keeps the width of the line drawn the same size. The width is set by varying the spread of the nibs on these type of pens.
If you want to draw perfectly parallel lines, like for rail caps and the like, you need one of these puppies. It's called a "railroad pen."
I recently scored a real rarity:
It's a Keuffel and Esser "Paragon" (their top line) "dotting pen." Cost me twenty-four bucks. Ivory handle, which screws off to reveal a "pricker" for tracing (you punch a little hole through the original drawing into the new one when tracing with paper that you can't see through. Made obsolete by the invention of the light table.) and the wheel picks up ink from inside (it opens up to fill) and draws a very fine dotted line. There are five other wheels stored in the nib assembly which can be swapped out to draw a variety of perfect broken lines: dots, dashes, dot-dot-dash, dash-dot-dash and so on. It's a lot of fun playing with the "tools of the trade" as well as fun drawing the things we do.
Continued in next post: