Introduction

For this assignment we selected a mechanism from 507 mechanical movements to recreate in Adobe Illustrator. When looking through designs, I decided to attempt to recreate movement #69. I liked this design because of the uniquely shaped gear teeth and I feel like this gear could be useful in creating any sort of delay mechanism. The gear is shown below as well as the animation created on the website:

Sketched mechanism

animated MECHANISM (found here)

This design is described as “a small wheel with one tooth, is the driver, and the circumference entering between the teeth of the wheel, A, serves as a lock or stop while the tooth of the small wheel is out of operation.”

Creation of Design

To begin, I imported the original image into Adobe Illustrator and attempted a live trace. It did not turn out very well. The lines were very choppy and disconnected. In this case, I figured the best way would be to start from scratch.

Example of poor image trace quality

I used the original image in the background and began by creating the basic circles that would outline the gears. Then I created the teeth using line draw to make one tooth and then rotated that tooth around the center point of the gear. I determined the necessary circumference by a simple calculation and then copied 30 teeth around the circle.

rotation screen made pattern easily replicated

The next task focused on creating the small delay gear. This was pretty difficult because the sketch was very unclear. I used inspiration from the animated design because it was significantly clearer. Using this as a guide, I created the small gear. One interesting feature I discovered in this stage was the scissors function of Adobe Illustrator. It allows you to split features and then remove portions. For example, you could remove a piece of a circle by separating it at intersects of other lines and then deleting that portion. Through using this method, I was able to recreate this smaller gear and finalize my design.

Conclusion

Overall, this project was a great introduction to Adobe Illustrator. I feel comfortable in being able to use image trace to recreate an image, and touch it up with other features if needed. I learned that image trace, while it can be useful, is pretty flawed if you don’t have a precise image to work with. I look forward to using Adobe Illustrator in the future with plasma cutting and CNC machining and I’m interested to see if the gear I created would actually mesh if it was laser cut.

final adobe file (Downloadable HERE!)