For this assignment we need to prepare the 2D Drawing of components of a simple machine with Adobe Illustrator. I chose the Roller-Gearing Mechanism for my project, because I love the way a small plate drives a bigger one with contact of rollers located on its circumference. Also, roller gearing is a great way of gearing solutions, because it reduces friction and requires less lubrication than ordinary gears.
The math behind this mechanism is the rule of hypocycloids — If a small circle is rolled around the inside of a circle exactly twice as large in diameter, any point on the small circle will trace a straight line, which will be a radius line of the large circle.
The machine consists of the following major parts:
- A disk
- Three rollers
- A spider and a spider hub
- A crank and a crank handle
- Bearing
- A Base plate and a back plate
- different kinds of axles
Among all above, 1-6 are parts that need to be cut with a laser cutter.
The disk
First, I drew a circle with diameter of 5 ” and concentric one with diameter 5/16 ”. Then I made a horizontal rectangle with dimension 5 ”*(21/32) ”centered at the center of the circle, and duplicate two same rectangles and rotate by -60 and 60 degrees. Now there are simple shapes on top of each other at the right place. The last step is to use the pathfinder to separate all parts like the graph above.
Rollers
Rollers are easy to make. 2 concentric circles
Spider
The way the spider presented in the book is a sample with reference inch ruler and we need to photocopy the page and paste it on the wood board if we were making the machine without laser cutter. No specific dimensions of the exterior border are provided. So I scanned the page, imported it into illustrator and used Live Trace and get a trace of the spider together with the ruler. Then I created another layer in the artboard, pasted the trace of the spider and ruler, tilted it until the ruler was horizontal and scaled the width of the entire thing 3”. The next parts are simply done by making circles and put them on the right place of the trace.
Crank
Bearing
Back Plate
For the crank, the bearings and the back plate, I will put them together due to similar technique of drawing. They are based on Arcs with indicated Radius, rectangles and straight tangent lines connecting the rectangle and arc. I made these parts by drawing circles and rectangles, connecting lines using the pen tool and use the ‘merge’ function under shape modes.
The remaining parts are easy basic shapes and easy to draw.
For the original Illustrator file, click here: Peter2ddrawing
For the pdf version, click here: Peter2ddrawing (The second layer of the spider was redundant, which should be deleted)
Peter Chen
