This week, my project was to create 2D drawings of a moving mechanism. I selected movement #172. This mechanism creates reciprocating linear motion by turning a crank (figure 1).
Figure 1: Adobe Illustrator 2D Drawings
The Process
I am not very competent with Adobe Illustrator, so developing these 2D drawings was a four step task:
1. SOLIDWORKS PART
I decided to upload the picture of the mechanism to Solidworks and and trace the object there. This way, it was easy to keep track of dimensions and the relationship between parts. After sketching the part in 2D and specifying dimensions and relationships, I extruded the part (figure 2).
Figure 2: Solidworks part
2. SOLIDWORKS DRAWING
Once extruded, I created a drawing from the part using a 1:1 scale and saved the drawing as a PDF.
Figure 3: Solidworks drawing
3. REPEAT
This mechanism had three components, so I repeated steps one and two for the remaining components.
4. ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR
Once all the components were drawn and saved as a PDF, I loaded all the PDFs in Adobe Illustrator. Then, I copied and pasted the individual components into one file and dragged the images until they overlapped. This gave me my final product (figure 1).
Cost
The costs associated with this project was labor time, a Solidworks license, and an Adobe Illustrator license.
1. LABOR
Once I was done fiddling around with Adobe Illustrator, the process took about 45 minutes. The minimum wage in Texas is $7.25, but my time is worth more because I put love and care into my work (as I’ve mentioned previously). Let’s say that I work at about $12/hour, so the total labor for these drawings was about $9.
2. SOLIDWORKS
A Solidworks license, as I’ve recently learned, is very expensive. Buying a Solidworks standard license is about $4000! Let’s say that my company bought Solidworks for the year and our company constantly uses Solidworks. Then, our company would be using Solidworks for 2080 hours. I used less than one hour, so proportionally I used about $1.50 worth of this CAD program.
3. ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR
A license costs $21/month. Assuming I’m part of a company that constantly uses AI, then my company will use AI for about 180 hours/month. Because I used AI for less than an hour, I only used about $0.11 of that license.
By adding up these three components, we arrive at the overall cost of this project
TOTAL COST: $10.61
