After perusing the many (507) options for a mechanical movement, I finally settled on the heart cam, movement #96, to recreate in Illustrator. The heart cam can be seen in the image below, and can be found here
Heart Cam
The heart cam transforms rotational motion into uniform lateral motion. When the heart rotates, the shaft moves left to right, maintaining contact with the surface of the heart.
I saved the PNG from the website, and opened the file in illustrator. The first thing I tried was an image trace of the picture from the website. This did not work out.
The trace failed to recognize the heart
I then realized I was not getting out of this the easy way. My next plan was to draw out the shapes over the original drawing. I started with the circles in the heart. Luckily, the center of the PNG file was already the exact center of the circle, so I could just use the circle tool and align it with the center of the image.
Perfectly centered circle
Once I created the two circles, I began my approach for the heart shape. For this part, I decided to use the pen tool. I made a very rough curve for the bottom of the heart, and added many points to the curve (27 to be exact). I then arranged the points around the heart’s edge, and adjusted the magnitude and direction of the curve at those points using the pen tool. After quite some time, I was left with a curve that looked very much like the original image.
Zoomed in curve (red) on original image (blue)
Zoomed Out curve (circled red is the zoomed in image above)
Finished Curve (red)
Now, because the gear is symmetrical, all I had to do was create a copy of the curve I just made and flip it. To flip it, I simply dragged the bottom of the copy’s resizing box over the top of the box, which mirrored the curve over the x-axis. Then, I just set the dimensions of this new curve to be the same as the original, and I moved it so that it connected with the original.
Resizing box and dimensions
The last thing I did was create the shaft on the right side of the image. This was really simple, just two concentric circles and two horizontal lines tangent to those circles. After using the circle tool and line tool for the shaft, I was finished!
Reflection:
I was pretty upset when the image trace didn’t work, but I understand that the original image wasn’t extremely high resolution, which I figured was the problem. Additionally, using the pen tool was occasionally frustrating, but it did a very good job of replicating the curve the way I wanted it to. Overall, I learned alot more about how to use Illustrator in a practical sense.
