John Michael Austin 2D drawing windmill 2-rceb7z- file hosted here 

For this project, I chose to create a vector drawing of the windmill from 507 mechanical movements. I chose this in particular because I liked the way that when out of the wind, the panels flip around to avoid slowing the others located directly across as they begin to catch wind.

To begin I downloaded the original image as a jpeg, found below on the top left, and put it into Adobe Illustrator. I then tried to use the trace image functionality of AI to easily convert my jpeg into a vector image, but this failed miserably and I resigned myself to drawing out the whole thing.

To begin, I designed the arms of the windmill, which took much longer than expected. I often had to look up techniques for how to do things online, and YouTube was very useful for completing this project. Once the arms were set, I learned how to copy the object around the center of a new circle, repeating every 60 degrees. This was extremely finnicky and I still do not understand why it worked sometimes and not others. Once this was done, I fused all the appropriate rectangles and circles together using the pathfinder panel to create the star wheel pictured at the right. The result can be found in the bottom left of the below picture.

In order to actually use this to laser cut something, I then separated out all of the constituent parts for an exploded view on the right hand side. This was FAR more difficult than I expected and I ended up having to basically re-do the entire project. This was because I was not expecting to have to take the whole thing apart so I was very liberal with my path-fusion, which it turns out is an irreversible action in AI. Because of this I re-drew the six arm star and had to re-apply my rotation method. This time I was more careful to center the arm rectangles with the center of the circle, thus I’m confident the schematic on the right will be more functional than the rendering on the left.

In the final product I removed the dowels, so that they would not be laser cut. They are included here for the purposes of reminding me I need to peg the whole thing together.

Once I finished I used my new skills to make a vector drawing of one of my favorite logos, the ad for the Cannondale CAAD 12 aluminium road bike, who’s slogan is “Join the Aluminati” which appeals to me in a lot of ways. It is below, and will soon be on a lot of the stuff I own.