For this project, I used a PDF from a design booklet to create a drawing in illustrator to (in theory) be cut out using the laser cutter. The most difficult part of this process was getting a feel for the Adobe illustrator program. I discovered that I had forgotten most of the tools I had been taught in class and had to relearn them when I worked on the project again. I am definitely making a note of this so next time I get a tutorial in a program I’ll practice those skills within a day or so of having learnt them.  I had also saved my work in a place that apparently gets deleted when you log off, so I lost my first day of work! That did however give me more (probably useful) practice in illustrator. For the gears and certain parts of other components I used the image trace tool on the line art setting.  I used line art because it made the black lines all the same wt. of 2. I then re-sized the line wt. to 0.75. One tool I found useful was the rotate function. Sometimes the traced image was slightly off due to the fact that it was not perfectly 90 degrees when scanned. Another handy tool I found was the scissors tool which creates new points on a line so you can delete part of the line.  I ended up using image trace for almost all the pieces. Some were easier using a line tool or the circle tool.  I also discovered the curved rectangle tool, which I used and then spliced in half as I only needed two curved corners, and that was the only way I could figure out how to do that. The coolest part to make were the gears which I made first. They were difficult though to make the teeth smooth. Many of them were sort of bumpy or square when they should have been rounded because the picture in the book wasn’t exactly smooth. For this I zoomed in and tried to round them out using the little pull tab that made things more rounded, or I would move the points slightly or change the location of the point’s handles.  I had to be careful in doing this though as not to deviate from the correct shape of the gear (not trading roundness for correct dimensions).  Overall though, I feel much more comfortable using illustrator.