CAD CAM at work
WHEN I started at Jaguar in the late Seventies there was a huge engineering block at Brown’s Lane called the GEC that housed the body, chassis, electric and powertrain drawing offices. Each floor was then filled with traditional drawing boards worked on by draughtsmen. Jaguar’s engineering director, Jim Randle, then had a development department in a separate building that was staffed by graduate engineers. The CAD CAM revolution of the mid Eighties made all of that redundant and because at Jaguar this started with the XJ41, I saw that change first-hand.
By the time I left in 2002 there were only computers; everything had moved onto CAD CAM and the whole structure and personnel were different because of this. It had huge consequences for the older draughtsmen who didn’t want to take to using a computer. A few did re-skill to became competent with the CAD but some of the traditionalists who didn’t want to adopt and adapt quickly got left behind. By the time I left, at Jaguar’s new engineering centre outside Whitley there wasn’t a drawing board within the whole of engineering.
We in the studio still used clay for our initial designs but as mentioned in my previous column the data was captioned originally with contact probes and later with cameras. But our department now had several dozen what I called ‘CAD jockeys’, the CAD operators that took all of this raw data and digitally created the car’s surfaces.
Jaguar was at ahead of the curve with this change since the XJ41 was the first car to be designed by CAD CAM. The consequences were enormous. Swapping to CAD CAM half-way through the car’s development delayed the project by at least three years which was one of the reasons why it was cancelled by Ford after the company bought Jaguar in 1989. Without CAD CAM the XJ41 would have reached production in the late Eighties. Not only would this have meant the end of the XJ-S but the DB7 wouldn’t have happened since the Aston Martin came out of the XJ41.
EVERYONE IN THE DESIGN AND ENGINEERING TEAMS INITIALLY HAD HUGE RESERVATIONS ABOUT THE CHANGE
Everyone in the design and engineering teams initially had huge reservations about the change because instead of the large monitors of today we were trying to make judgements looking at scree
