Readers, if you take one thing from this post, let it be the following: read and understand the instructions before any project. They contain useful and necessary information that at the very least will give you an easy way to achieve the task. Skimming them is not acceptable. Trust me, doing this will save you hours of effort for most things.
With that foreshadowing aside, let’s begin a tutorial on how to draw mechanisms on Illustrator. There are two ways you can do this: one, use the image trace option if you have already have a schematic or illustration of your mechanism, or two, freehand. If possible, always go for option number 1. Illustrator does not care for your art skills. Of course, I choose option number 2. Reread paragraph 1 for the reason why.
For this project, I choose this mechanism to Illustrate. The site called it a Geneva-stop, and some Googling later I found that it was invented by a Swiss watchmaker used to limit the winding up of watch springs. When I started sketching, I used some geometry to try and draw the main gear, but while the result looked somewhat nice, it was time-consuming and didn’t match up quite well.
First attempt. Notice how the curved lines don’t match.
This was not going according to plan. Time to try something else. I created a new document and opened the image of the mechanism I wanted to trace, which I got by saving it from the website.
Like this.
Then I tried using the Image Trace option on the Object tab. However, this was the result:
Definitely not what I needed.
Fiddling with the options, I changed the preset from the default into the other options until something good happened. One of the last options, Silhouette, worked for me, although I don’t know if it will work for every image.
Nice edges.
This gave me an outline I could work on. However, it was still a whole object, making it difficult to modify individual parts. To remedy this, I used the Expand option, then selected everything and Ungrouped them.
You should have something like this at this point.
Because they are ungrouped, the parts are separate and hard to work with. I selected one of the individual pieces of the mechanism (including the circles inside), then used the Shape Maker tool to make it an object. Repeat with the other parts of the mechanism. The objects are pure black, while the original picture is just a black outline.
Original on the left, objects on the right.
The final product is the two objects. We can edit them to change the color of the insides to be transparent, and change the outline to different colors. If needed, the size and individual shape can be easily altered.
Final result.
And that’s it! It took me around 20 minutes for the whole process, and it probably takes less if you know what you’re doing, which I definitely did not at the start. Also, this method may vary in efficacy for other designs (especially with parts close together), so it’s not a solve-all tool. However, learning it gives you another tool at your disposal, a shortcut to make projects less back-breaking. I definitely recommend messing around with Illustrator and see if there’s an easier way.
If you want to explore my Illustrator file, here it is: Geneva Stop v3.0-2n2l4h4
