Scale Drawings for Dummies

Blueprint Scale Drawing

In the good old days before some guy named Panda at Google ruined it for everyone, freelancers could rake in tons of money for throwing even the most inane crap on a screen and settling back to wait for the residual income. Most of the content farms that took advantage of this search engine loophole have long since gone to the great website graveyard in the sky, but a few remain; as does the aforementioned inane crap they hosted. eHow.com was arguably the most famous content farm; a site that harvested millions of search queries and turned a stable of unqualified contributors loose on them. Take, for instance, the search query "How to Calculate the Area & Scale for Building Plans." Ehowian Stephanie Ellen (real last name Sundberg) leveraged her health sciences, math and creative writing degrees for this one... though we noticed there's no drafting or architecture in that list.

As so often happened at eHow, Steph simply chose to interpret the query for easy cribbing. In this case, she decided that all the OQ wanted to know was how to scale down a drawing. To that end, she did a fair job with instructions calculating a scale factor (how hard could it be, after all?), although she's not too sharp if she thinks the longest dimension of a building would be thirty feet or that someone would be drawing house plans on a sheet of paper ten inches long.

Be that as it may, Sundberg had a little problem with the topic, informing her readers that "Building plans aren't drawn to size, they are drawn to scale, which means that you 'shrink' the area down and make a scale model on paper..." ...a typical eHow sloppy description. First, you don't make a "scale model on paper," since a model is a three-dimensional object and paper is two-dimensional. You make a scale drawing. Second, you don't "shrink the area," you shrink the dimensions – or to be more accurate, you apply a constant scale factor, a divisor, to each measurement. And, of course, it's impossible to perform Sundberg's first instruction,

"Measure the longest part of your building project, in feet..."

...unless you have a time machine: you can't measure what doesn't yet exist!

The most useless aspect of Steph's post, however, is that she simply left everything hanging after explaining a rudimentary scale factor calculation (three feet per inch, by the way, is not particularly common). Apparently she thought she was done, even though the question specifically asks about area, which she only mentioned in passing in her introduction. Not only does she do nothing to help the OQ determine area, she does as little as possible to help him actually create a scale drawing.

Doing the minimum possible to collect her stipend, answering only half a question, and demonstrating no familiarity with the topic: those are all reasons we give people like Sundberg the Dumbass of the Day award.

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