In this assignment, we were to take a mechanical movement from the most ancient scripture in engineering, 507 Mechanical Movements, and recreate it using Adobe Illustrator. I chose movement 222, for no reason other than that I thought it looked cool.

The picture is to the left. The reason it looks cool, which is hard to tell from this picture, is that only the two big gears on the left and right have a fixed center of rotation. The right-most gear is fixed off-center so when it rotates, the little gear in the middle moves up and down in a really pleasant to watch manner.

Since I am almost certain that verbal description made no sense, check out the animated GIF on the 507 Mechanical Movements website. You won’t regret it.

Recreating this piece was actually relatively simple. I used an online gear generator to make two 24-teeth gears and one 18-teeth gear, which I then downloaded and scaled appropriately. I also added holes where appropriate based on the pictures. I could tell that the location of the off-center hole did not have to be precise for the mechanism to work, but I tried to emulate the original anyway. Keep reading for a longer rant about gear holes.

I then moved to making the links between the gears. I measured the length needed by looking at the distance from the center of the gear to the troughs between the teeth. I recreated the links using the pathfinder tool to merge the paths of two circles and a rectangle. I thought they looked pretty nice.

With this done, I decided to use my laser cutting time to try to actually make the device. I realized that the gears would need to be held down at their center of rotation so I made a square platform which I cut out and etched into using the laser cutter. I then found some skinny nails to use as axles. The hardest part was figuring out how big the holes in the gears needed to be. Some holes, like the one in the center of the middle gear, needed to be smaller than the nail so that the axle would stay in place. Others, like the off-center hole in the rightmost gear and the holes in the links, needed to be bigger so that the gear could rotate freely. I also had to cut out a washer to account for the vertical layering of the links.

Finally, I decided to test out how small the laser cutter can engrave text, and wrote my name on the links.

See the finished product below. It definitely still needs some work (tuning the length of the links, and finding some shorter nails) but it works fairly well. Also, you can download my Adobe Illustrator file here: Ways_Of_Moving_222.ai