Drawing some ovals (that are not ellipses)

Actually drawing some ovals (that are not ellipses) Bruno Postle · Follow 4 min read · Feb 10, 2017 -- Listen Share In the last part I hopefully made it clear why you wouldn’t want to use an actual ellipse when making a real object, curves constructed from multiple fixed radius arcs are much more useful and look just the same. So there is a traditional draughting technique for drawing a five centred arch that makes quite a good imitation of an ellipse, here is the diagram again: This is fine, but it is a solution to an old problem of drawing an ellipse on a drawing board with calipers and compass. These days we don’t have this problem, every CAD tool imaginable will let you easily draw ellipses — the problem we have is how to convert that ellipse into fixed radius curves that suit our practical building purposes — for this a bit more control would be useful. Following is my technique, this starts with an ellipse drawn in CAD drawn to the required height and width: The next step is ... Read full article.