Don't lean on the sheet. Left hand on the parallel bar, right hand on the pen, and keep the heel of your palm off the film or you'll pick up ink you laid down four minutes ago and drag it across the whole margin. I've got the plan and profile down at the shop already, so what's taped here is just the key, and the key is the part everybody skimps on and everybody regrets.
I'm inking this one at 1:240. That's set. Every figure on the sheet already agrees with it, so don't go recomputing anything, just draw.
Here's the rule under all the other rules: every line weight in this legend has to be the exact weight that same line is on the sheet. If breakdown is 0.35 on the plan and 0.25 in the key, the key is a lie and some poor soul is standing in a wet passage arguing with a Ziploc bag. Match the weights. Match them or don't bother.
Now the pens. Four are soaking in the ammonia jar and one's in my hand. Hold it upright — ninety degrees to the film. The second you cant it, the 0.13 skips and you've got a hairline gap in the middle of a wall, and a gap in a wall reads as a lead. Somebody will drive up from Chattanooga to push a gap you made by leaning.
Steady speed. Too fast and the ink can't keep up with you and the line breaks. Too slow — stop dead on the film — and the nib dwells and it blots, and a wet blot has a red-brown halo around it for about four seconds before it dries flat black, and by then it's a permanent part of the drawing. And the 0.13 will clog on you. It always does, about two feet of continuous line in. When it starts skipping and it isn't your hand, flush it.
Go on. Proof strip's along the bottom margin, that's what it's for. Pick a nib off the rack — or just hit 1 through 5 — and lay some line down. Click any symbol box up there and I'll stamp it into the strip at whatever nib you're holding, correctly scaled. Press C to run it through the ammonia jar.
“ODILE — the man says the truck's ready but he's closing at noon sharp and I am not driving out there twice!” — Dee, from the kitchen
Alright. Ceiling heights get boxed numerals, never contours — contours on a cave plan look like breakdown from six feet away and I've watched a man crawl over a number. Pit hachures get the depth in feet on the downslope side, so you know which way you're falling before you read how far. Sump line closes hard: that's water, that's the end, go home. A too-tight lead stays open — leave the wall unclosed so that when somebody skinnier than you finally pushes it in 1987 they can ink straight on from where I stopped without erasing a thing.
Stations in red. Always red, never black. A survey sheet lives its whole life as a bad third-generation photocopy in a wet bag, and black dots vanish into the wall lines the first time through the machine. Red drops out to grey and stays a dot.
And hachures get ruled. Every single one, against the triangle. Freehand hachures — I can spot them across a room, they wobble, they don't converge, and they make an honest survey look like a place mat. Don't do it in my house.