For this week’s assignment we got to use every mechanical engineer’s favorite website: 507 mechanical movements.
I scoured the website for a mechanism to replicate that did not involve gears, and finally settled on mechanism #92. (I’ve had experience 2D modeling gears in the past and trust me.. I was not about to go back down that route.)
My selected mechanism
Having worked a bit with Adobe Illustrator before, I knew that importing the image and using live image trace would not be the most effective way to complete this assignment. Oftentimes the program misses certain lines and the trace ends up really bad. So, I decided to do things the old-fashioned way and manually trace the mechanism.
First, I imported the png. file and locked the layer down. I then used rectangles and the handy shape builder tool to construct the track of the mechanism.
Shape builder tool takes isolated shapes and combines them to create full paths
Next, I started to experiment with the pen tool on Illustrator. I knew this tool could be used to create the curves needed for the other components, but it took a bit of trial and error to remember how to use it. With the curves done, I finished off the red attachment with more of the shape builder tool.
Attempt 1: these flawless curves
I then moved on to the largest part of the mechanism, the wheel. While I could have used the pen tool for these curves, I found that the curve tool was more intuitive. I was able to simply click and create anchor points that would automatically connect together. Once one inner curve was done, it only took a little copy, paste and reflection about an axis to replicate all the inner curves.
Pen tool for creating curves
While this assignment was pretty straight forward and didn’t allow for much creativity, it was extremely helpful. I picked up a couple tricks in Illustrator and was able complete the assignment without too much stress. Compared to the project from last week, it was a nice break 🙂
