This week we had to make a 2D drawing of one of the setups in 507 mechanical movements to practice using illustrator and to get a preview of part of what our midterm project will entail. I am new to illustrator so this was a bit of an exploratory adventure for me. I decided to take it slow and start off with a movement that didn’t have gears, after hearing about the troubles that gears were posting to experienced illustrator-users. Instead, I chose movement #100: Quick return crank motion. It looked cool, I liked the quick-return part of the movement, and it seemed like a beginner-friendly design.

When I told my friend Madison (a 210 veteran) what I was working on, she warned me off from using image trace, as it really won’t create clean lines. I’d heard this from several others so I decided to not waste my time and instead copy an image of the movement into illustrator and trace lines over it.

I began with a basic screenshot that I had taken, but quickly realized that a lot of the features in illustrator would be more useful if I rotated my base image so that the linear parts were either vertical or horizontal. I began trying to make lines tangent to circles, and two lines parallel to each other but failed to find features in illustrator that made these relations easy. A super quick google search seemed to say that I would have to download a toolbox to get these features, so I reevaluated. i decided to use the rectangle tool instead of several line tools. This way, I could line up the edge of the rectangle with the center of the circle to get tangent lines, and the nature of a rectangle would ensure that the sides were parallel.

To clean up the design, I used shape builder to get rid of some lines that were used in construction but did not exist in the final design. I have a feeling that shape builder will come in handy in future illustrator endeavors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, once I had the entire image traced, I separated out the parts of the drawing so that if it were to be laser cut, the pieces could be cut separately and then assembled to create the desired movement.

Overall, this assignment took me a little longer than I wanted it to but it was fun to explore illustrator a little more (I also did this while watching the super bowl so that might have had a small role in my focus level…). I also learned that I am very used to SolidWorks and got frustrated when illustrator didn’t have some of the same features or controls.