This week’s project was relatively simple, until I chose to make gears for some godforsaken reason. The original picture is number 38 of 507 mechanical movements. A picture of the original GIF is reproduced below. These two gears rotate at varying speeds at different points in each revolution, which I thought was cool. Also, both gears are identical, so I really only needed to make one and copy it.

After cropping the number 38 out of the image, I pasted it into Adobe Illustrator and learned how to use the Image Trace tool. No matter how much I adjusted the settings, I couldn’t get the teeth to be the right shape, especially the teeth that connected the gears. I decided to start over and edit the image to be just black lines and try Image Trace again. It worked out better, as shown below, but it still wasn’t quite perfect.

Although the shaped were more closed this time, the teeth were still weird, and the connecting teeth were still more misshapen than the rest. Also, upon closer inspection the circles weren’t actual circles and not all lines that were meant to be intersecting were intersecting.

After remaking all the circles, I picked a nice looking tooth to be copied around the circle and used this method I found on YouTube. Basically, I grouped it with an object (a small circle, in this case) that I would put at the center of the circle, and used the Transform Effect window to make copies of the tooth.

After playing around with it for a bit, I figured out that I needed to rotate 15 degrees for each of the 15 copies on the longest arc. Once I copied the teeth, I went and used the Cut Tool to cut the circle where it intersected with the teeth. The first one went fine, but the copies weren’t recognized as paths for some reason, so Illustrator couldn’t find the intersection between the teeth copies and the circle.

So, instead of using Transform Effect, I used copy/transform again (Cmd-c Cmd-d on a Mac) to make sure each tooth was recognized as a path. Then I went through the long process of using the Cut Tool to make sure no lines were sticking out. I repeated this for the other two radii on the gear, grouped everything together, copied everything to make another gear, and I was done!

Overall, the process took about 5 hours. A lot of this time was attempting methods that didn’t work out and learning how to use all of the tools that Illustrator provides. If I pay myself $10 an hour, and I pay for the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite (60% off for students!), the total cost comes out to $70.