Name: Avinash Shivakumar
Assignment #3
For this assignment, I made 2D drawings, in Adobe Illustrator, of parts of the “Harmonic Oscillation Punch Machine Template” from one of the woodworking books that Dr. Wettergreen provided us. As observable in the image from the book reproduced below, there are a few parts for this assembly that are not explicitly laser-cuttable parts. My focus was primarily on converting the profiles (from the left half of the page shown below) of the other parts to an Adobe Illustrator format.
I started by cropping the left side of the page by itself (as shown below) and then importing it into Adobe Illustrator.
From here, I attempted to use the Live Trace feature in Adobe Illustrator. However, no matter how I attempted to format and adjust the settings, the ‘Live Traced’ image did not clean up well: I would always have extra grid- or guidelines, or portions of the components would be missing or jagged. Upon closer inspection of the image directly above, I found that this ‘messy tracing’ was likely due to the fact that many of the components parts showed grid-lines that overlapped with the structures themselves. One example of this ‘messy tracing’ is shown below:
After puzzling over how to remedy this and adjusting and readjusting the settings on Live Trace, I went to Dr. Wettergreen for guidance on what next steps to take. He recommended that I essentially abandon the Live Trace feature and just ‘manually’ (on Adobe Illustrator, using feature tools) trace the objects myself, after overlaying them onto a slightly transparent background that comprised the left hand side page from the book (i.e. the image above the ‘messy tracing’); Dr. Wettergreen first taught me how to align the image so that its edges would lay coincident with the page boundaries. Here, too, I needed some assistance as my acquaintance with SolidWorks served to confound me more than help. I kept looking for ways in which to use Adobe Illustrator like SolidWorks, but many of the tools I have become familiar with on SolidWorks have no accurate analog in Adobe Illustrator. Some of the most perturbing differences are the lack of a smart dimensioning tool for specifying feature dimensions and the lack of a proper and versatile circular arc construction tool. After about a half hour of reconfiguring my comfort zone to accommodate Adobe Illustrator’s vastly different tool set, I managed to get the hang of the program. I ended up using primarily the Pen, Rectangle, and Ellipse tools, but I also used certain other features like the selection arrows and the Pathfinder sub-toolbox for multibody parts. I was able to finish outlining the rest of my component parts within the next hour.
Looking at the parts after my initial completion, I realized that some of these had slightly jagged edges. I neglected to record screenshots for these jagged pieces. Instead, I went through and corrected some of these jagged edges and other imperfections with the Pen tool and the Pathfinder sub-toolbox for multibody parts. I managed to rough out some of the edges to a great extent. However, without a proper dimensioning or circular arc tool, I was not able to reproduce all of my component parts exactly as shown in the book. I ultimately ended up with some unevenly patterned edges, and most of my circles are likewise misshapen. In fact, I am quite sure that a large number of my circles are slightly larger than specified in the book with respect to the rest of their respective component parts; this may be in part due to the fact that I tended to trace on the outer edges of the shapes in the background. In my uploaded file, I have solely suppressed the background ‘stencil’ instead of deleting it altogether so that anybody who would like to can view how my parts may overlap, structurally, with those from the book.
My completed parts, though likely slightly inaccurate through visual inspection, are shown below:
