Drawing to Scale
Drawing to Scale was a project funded by the Museums Galleries Scotland Recognition Fund, available to museums who have achieved Recognition status - meaning that their museum practices have been shown to reach certain standards. The aim of the Fund is to encourage these museums to invest in projects that will raise awareness of their collections and to develop and expand the impact these collections and the work they are doing have on the wider public.
The purpose of the Drawing to Scale project was to produce plan drawings of many of the historical keyboard instruments in the University of Edinburgh's collection - although the equipment will then be available for use for other types of music instrument. These drawings will be a record of the instruments in their current state, detailing the layout and important features of all of these historically important instruments.
The Edinburgh pantograph was based on a design developed by John Watson, conservator of musical instrument at Colonial Williamsburg. It takes the simple principal of the artists/architects pantograph for enlarging or reducing drawings, and links it directly to a computer aided design (or CAD) programme via a digital drawing pad. In this case, the pointer is a laser pen, with its beam filtered and focused through exposed photographic film to reduce the beam to a practicable size. To the central part of the pantograph is fixed a puck, which is a location mouse that transfers the dimensions to the computer via the digital drawing pad.
The drawing process itself is relatively simple once one gets used to the CAD software: it is a case of positioning the laser pointer at the edge of part of the instrument, or in the central point of a pin, and then clicking the mouse-buttons on the puck. Each element is given a separate layer within the drawing, and these are colour coded for ease of recognition: case elements are pink, keyboards are pale blue, and pins are dark blue. These are arbitrary colours, chosen merely because they are easy to see against the grey background of the CAD programme when drawings. It is very easy to re-colour all the elements for the purpose of printing. In the majority of cases, the instruments in the collection are far too large to be measured in a single position: in which case a series of smaller drawings are made, taking care to overlap the drawings so that they may be mapped onto each other at a later stage.
This article was published on 19 February 2013