Process:
For Homework 2, I decided to recreate Mechanical Movement 55 in a 2D drawings. This is what mechanical movement 55 looks like:
At first, I planned to use GearGenerator.com, a electronic gear making service, which we apparently have a subscription for. However, Adolfo and I coulnd’t get it to work without paying to generate the SVG file I wanted, so I opted to create it from scratch on Illustrator instead!
For help, I went to Youtube, where I found this video:
It was actually super helpful and I learned some functionalities of the Pathfinder tool that I didn’t know before. As for how I determined number of teeth and their size, it was a mixture of trial and error and literally counting the teeth in the drawing for movement 55 (which is definitely not ideal, but it helped).
Once I had made the 2 inner gears of movement 55, I was struggling to figure out how I would go about creating the big outer gear. This is when Adolfo pointed me in the direction of the Shape Builder tool, which was really perfect for what I was trying to do. I can defininitely see myself using this tool a ton later on for other purposes.
Homework Questions:
Q. How much did it cost to create this file? Clearly document your calculations, including labor, and machine time.
A. So first I’m going to lay out some assumptions that will aid me in calculating the total cost of creating this 2d drawing:
1) My labor is worth $10/hr, considering that’s the typical hourly pay of a student worker on campus.
2) In total, I spent ~ 2 hours watching videos and actually creating the drawings.
3) A semester at Rice is 15 weeks.
With these numbers, in mind, we can say that the labor cost of me creating this 2d drawing was $20. Now, since we are at Rice, and the OEDK has free access to a computer lab with Illustrator, I did not have to buy the program or computer myself, so that was free. Although this may only be the fortunate case for a university student, there is a huge cost lingering behind every hour of a university student’s time:
TUITION!!
Rice University tuition costs are $21,959 per semester. There are 15 weeks in a semester. 15 weeks equates to 2,520 hours, and 2 hours represents a measly .07% of that time. However, .07% of $21,959 is…… a whopping $17.43. Adding this all up, we have a grand total of $37.43, all deriving from time-associated costs. (Now I’m starting to think that the $2 GearGenerator download may have been worth it).
If I knew how to create a gear in Illustrator from the get-go, and if I didn’t have to deal with the complications with GearGenerator, it probably would’ve taken like 15 minutes, so my numbers may be a bit dramatized in that sense.
Anywyas, here is my Illustrator file:
Thanks for reading!
