Attached above is the .ai file for adobe illustrator drawing of a steam crank mechanism.
For this week’s project, I had problems with being able to cut to anchor or “snap” points. The hardest part of the transition from solidworks to the adobe platform is mainly a difference in user-friendliness. In Solidworks, I can simply cut the between to anchor points, but the scissor tool here doesn’t allow me to so I tried zooming in as much as possible to cut lines that overlapped. There might be a better way. I tried to “unite” and mesh two shapes together, but I had problems with the combination because the shapes have to be one continuous line.
I was also panicking because I did not know how to re-scale everything since I made it two times too big. After trying different commands, I found it was simply right-click transform and then “scale” which made everything work out.
Above is the re-sizing tool that I found.
The other hard part about drawing figures for this particular assignment is that there were no inch dimensions in the reference book and so everything was based on the grid that served as a background to the parts. As a result, the drawings might not be extremely accurate, but for the purposes of this assignment I think it should be good enough.
Getting used to how Adobe worked was confusing at times, but at the end of the day, it is still pretty user-friendly.
Below are some snapshots of how it looks. the picture to the right shows the line of commands at the bottom that we can choose from. Overall, the geometries were not too difficult and with a CAD background, I feel like that even though I did not know everything about AI, I still could tackle different geometries in a similar way.
