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Engineering Plotter Printers for Large Format Drawings
In engineering companies, the output of all the work performed is usually a drawing or a set of drawings. These drawings contain all the details, measurements, materials specifications and even assembly information for whatever product is being designed. The clarity of these drawings is vitally important to the proper implementation of the engineering effort.
Engineering drawings may have very finely detailed intricate parts or assemblies. If they were to be printed on ordinary computer printers on ordinary sized paper, then the drawing would be so small that these details would all run together and be almost impossible to make out without magnification. If instead, the detailed portions of the drawing ware blown up and printed on a separate page, then the drawings turn into a thick sheaf of papers and anyone who needs to use them must flip through page after page to find the information they need.
Instead, most engineering firms use a special large format printer to reproduce engineering drawings. This type of printer is called an engineering plotter printer. Engineering plotter printers can print out drawing several feet wide depending upon the size of the printer. The paper for these plotter printers comes in rolls on a 2” or 3” core which is fed into the printer and then cut to the required length as needed for each drawing.
These large size drawings are printed out in a large enough scale that the fine details can be easily seen on the same drawing that shows the entire part component or assembly. Instead of straining with a magnifying glass or flipping through a sheaf of small drawings, a large format drawing makes the drawings easy to use on the factory floor or in the prototype lab.
Large format engineering plotter printers have also widely replaced the older blue print machines that were used to reproduce large format drawings in engineering and architectural offices. Drawings historically were made by hand with pen or pencil on a special translucent paper, vellum or a Mylar film. To make copies of these originals, a piece of photo sensitive blue print paper was place against the drawing and the two were run through a developing machine. The blueprint machine would expose the paper to a bright ultraviolet light that would eat away the chemical layer on the blueprint paper leaving lines only where the light was blocked by the lines drawn on the original translucent drawing. To darken the lines, an ammonia based chemical vapor was played over the exposed blueprint paper changing the barely visible lines to a dark blue or purple color.
Using digital drawings and an engineering plotter printer is much faster and cheaper than the old blueprint process.