Warbird Information Exchange

Can anyone till me, the easiest way to make working drawings from micro film?

There are several ways. Perhaps the easiest is to have blueprints made from the microfilm, although this gets pretty costly before too long.

Another method is to scan them into your computer, and print them out. This can be pretty difficult too though, as many microfilm sets use more surface area than a standard 35mm negative scanner can scan (ie. the scan area of the scanner was designed for 35mm film, but the area used on the microfilm is larger, and hence gets clipped in the scan). You can get scanners which scan larger areas, but these usually have less resolution than you need to read the fine print in the drawings.

The only other method I can think of is to use a microfilm reader to view the microfilm, and then transcribe the drawing using a CAD package on a computer... by hand. AutoCAD, or Solidworks are pretty good CAD packages. It's a lengthy procedure, but thems the breaks I'm afraid.

Hope this helps... and good luck!

Cheers,
Richard

Depends on how many drawings you need out of the film package and more importantly, what quality are the films. The films for a couple of my projects vary from nice, easily printed views to ones that are going to take a complete rebuilding of the item by developing everything in the area via a CAD routine.

BTW, the raw cost estimate over ten years ago to print out all nine spools of film for my Fairchild was in the area of $12,000.

Hope this helps

Craig
cvairwerks@ev1.net

West-Pac Restorations has a technician/computer guru that does this full time, converting drawings from microfilm to electronic format. They have software ($$$$) that picks up the lines on the drawing and converts it. There is a lot of cleanup work required which is where the technician comes in.