Hey folks,
For the third assignment each of us picked a machine from a woodworking book and the task is to create 2D drawings of the parts of the machine in the software Illustrator. The drawings can be used to machine, plasma cut or laser cut the parts.
I chose the Geneva Wheel, it wasn’t the easiest one but was definitely one of the coolest ones. Here are some pictures:
A Geneva wheel is a gear mechanism that translates continuous rotation motion into intermittent rotation motion. Its main application used to be watches and also movie projectors, but it has been substituted by electronic control. To learn more click here. This gif below shows how this mechanism works.
Geneva wheel motion
At first sight I thought the drawings would be pretty easy to do, because I’ve had experience in 2D drawing with CAD softwares (AutoCAD and Solidworks). But it turned out not being so easy. Illustrator proved it is not a CAD software, therefore it operates with a different logic and the functions I was used to were not there. So instead of using things like trim, fillet, array and others, I had to spend a fair amount of time on Google looking for ways to do what I needed with the functions and tools present in Illustrator. I was able to achieve the goal and do everything I needed bu before that I had to learn how to use functions like scissor, rotate, unite among others.
The two plates were very straight forward, they are basically rectangles with holes in it. To draw I just used the rectangle and circle tool and positioned the circles using guide lines. For the back plate I drew both the top and front views, including the dashed lines to represent the holes depth.
To draw the drive pin arm and the spacer I basically drew simple shapes such as circles and rectangles and used the pathfinder tool to subtract and add these shapes and create the part.
The two parts that demanded more work and time were the geneva wheel and the locking disk.
To create the geneva wheel I drew a big circle and then some basic shapes to represent the area that need to be subtracted, then used the rotate command 6 times with 60 degrees each to create the pattern shown below:
The next step was to subtract all the shapes from the big circles using the pathfinder tool.
The last part to be drawn was the locking disk. The major concern of this part are the curves on the top to prevent it from touching the geneva wheel. Therefore to construct it I overlapped the disk with the geneva wheel, drew some circles, to ensure a gap and the subtracted these shapes from the disk.
This is the original illustrator file:
Overall I’m very satisfied with the result and how the drawings look. And even though the process took longer and was more difficult than what I expected, I learned a lot doing it.
Thanks and see you guys next time!
Lucas
