Mechanical Drafters

A Day in the Life

As a mechanical drafting technician, you'll work in an office or cubicle stocked with a state-of-the-art computer as well as analog tools like compasses, triangles and curves. Depending upon your position and level of seniority within your company, you could work in a cubicle-filled bullpen, design studio or standalone office.

When you come into work in the morning, you'll sit down at your desk and check your e-mail and phone messages. Before you begin your workday, you'll spend 15 to 20 minutes catching up on communications with the engineers who will use the machines and tools that you design as well as your fellow designers at the office. Once you're caught up, you'll commence work on the drawings of new and redesigned parts, tools and machinery that you've been working on for the past week.

As a mechanical drafter, you'll be responsible for designing many different types of machines and tools. On this particular day, you could be working on the design for a new robotic arm that's crucial to your factory's assembly line. Later in the week, you might start working on a complicated hydraulic lift. By next month, you'll be working with a team of drafters to create a blueprint of the power generator for your facility's new assembly line. Other mechanical drafters at your facility might work on vehicle transmissions, welding tools and elevator gears.

For all of these projects, you'll start by sketching out a basic schematic drawing by hand. You'll need to understand exactly how the machine's components interact with one another. As such, you may need to spend part of your day studying similar pieces of equipment. As the day goes on, you'll consult these examples to ensure that your drawings remain true to form.

To help flesh out your drawings, you'll use efficient computer-aided drafting and design software as well as analog blueprints and measuring devices. Over the course of your day, you'll also use engineering triangles and circles to measure angles and accurately represent distances. When you have a question about a particular component of the tool or machine that you're designing, you'll consult with the engineer in charge of the project. If you're re-designing a tool or machine, you'll use the blueprints and abstracts that they provide to ensure that your new designs are functionally compatible with the devices.

During the afternoon, you might leave your office to visit your employer's testing facility and witness a test of a device that you recently helped to redesign. By witnessing the device in action, you'll be able to determine whether it needs to be tweaked further. As it's being tested, you'll make a detailed, statistics-based analysis of its performance and note areas that need to be improved. Although the engineer in charge of your project will have the last word as to whether the product that you helped to design is ready for commercial use, your presence on the factory floor will ensure that you're on the same page during any further re-designs.

In the late afternoon, you'll head home for the day. If you work at a facility that employs a significant number of welders and machinists, you'll probably leave work with the first-shift workers that use the devices that you design. As you walk out with them, you'll take pride in knowing that you help to provide them with high-quality tools and machines for their everyday tasks.