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On Oct 2, 11:23 am, Paul O wrote:
wrote:
On Oct 1, 5:16 pm, Paul O wrote:

I miss my trusty old Staedtler-Mars electric eraser. I wonder where it
is now?

Well, I actually have one. NOS. Not sure about the brand, though.

If you're _really_ interested, let me know.

- Frank Krygowski

Frank,
Nostalgia can be a funny thing. I remember how well my old electric
eraser worked. It did a quick, clean, and thorough job at erasing lines
on mylar and vellum. But the overall activity for which it was designed
to do was a PITA.

A couple of years after I moved to the drawing board, my company
purchased a bunch of PC workstations and a site license for an early DOS
version of AutoCAD (AutoCAD 5?). Before long, all of my drafting tools
were gathering dust in the bottom of a desk drawer and my drafting board
became a big horizontal surface to hold print-outs, books, and catalogs.
The simple truth was that preparing drawings with a CAD program was much
easier, faster, and more accurate than doing it by hand. And I could
erase hundreds of lines with an "E" command and a few mouse clicks.

That job ended and I moved on. I still have some of my drafting tools
but I never use them. And, I still use AutoCAD a fair amount (I'm up to
release 2008 now). So I probably would never use my old Staedtler-Mars
eraser even if I still had it.

Thanks, but some things are better left in the past...

Yep. I understand completely. Sometimes nostalgia isn't all it's cut
out to be.

Honestly, the real reason I have that electric eraser is that it (and
a dozen clones) were being thrown out because CAD had made them
obsolete. I thought: "Hmm. Electric motor, collet chuck - that might
come in handy for _something_!" But it's languished in a drawer
unused ever since.

However, I note that for small, one-off drawings, I'm still faster
drawing with pencil and paper than I am with AutoCAD or its
competitors!

- Frank Krygowski