Learning tower crane assembly from paper plans back in 2005

I remember when we got the manual for a new Liebherr and it was just this thick stack of printed blueprints. Now I pull up a 3D model on my tablet right on site, spins the whole thing around to see how the jib connects. Anyone else prefer the old way or is that just me being stuck in my ways?

3 comments

3 Comments

miles_garcia14d ago

Man I feel you on this one. There's something about holding those big folded up blueprints that just felt right, you know? Like you really had to study the thing and figure it out in your head before you even touched a single bolt. Now everybody just spins the 3D model around and thinks they've got it figured out. I still catch myself printing out a couple key pages when I'm doing something tricky, just so I can lay them out on the tailgate and look at them without having to swipe a screen with greasy fingers.

lunag3013d ago

Oh man, I saw something about how muscle memory actually works different with paper versus screens. Wild stuff.

morgan_martinez13d ago

My buddy Rick spent like 3 hours rebuilding a carburetor last weekend using nothing but his phone screen that kept timing out on him. He was scrolling back and forth between a YouTube video and some PDF manual, getting greasy fingerprints all over it. Finally he just threw his hands up, went inside, and printed the whole dang thing out on 10 sheets of paper. He said it took him half the time after that because he could look at the page and the part at the same time. @miles_garcia is dead on about the greasy fingers thing too, Rick's phone screen looks like a crime scene now.