In this assignment, I created a vector file of a machine taken from 507 Mechanical Movements,with the intention that this machine could be laser/plasma cut and serve as inspiration for my mid-term project in February.

The mechanical movement that I chose to replicate was Machine Number 33, two non-circular gears. I knew that doing a live-trace of this drawing wouldn’t get me great edges, so I had to investigate a better strategy on how to build these gears.

   

My first attempt was to trace a perfectly circular gear design and see if I could transform it to an oval. I copied in Mechanical Movement Number 34 which would have a cleaner line to trace off from. Once I expanded the shape, I chose a tooth that traced well, smoothed it a bit, then cut it out using the Shape Builder Tool.

I resized the tooth to match the size of the oval gear and started copy-pasting more, adding them along the edge of the shape. Adding more and more, however, became frustrating – the gear teeth were not aligning well. I decided to quit this strategy and take a moment to rethink my goal.

I opened my journal and began sketching out the edge of the oval gear, realizing the complex tooth shape in Number 34 may not be necessary – a simpler “triangle” shape would work well enough. Then, I found that the teeth could be created by adding triangles and offsetting the edges from a concentric circle.

Restarting my pattern by first creating concentric ovals, then with the pen created a star pattern, tracing along the original gears edges. This technique turned out much better, I was able to get a clean outline of the original model and develop a gear I can use for preliminary testing in the future.

Future outcomes:

I was able to develop a good method for generating non-circular gears. Moving forward, I’ll be testing out these shapes by cutting out a laser print and see improvements I can make.

Tools I used:

• Adobe Illustrator
  • Ellipse, Pen Tool
  • Shape Builder
  • Live Trace
  • Paste in front/back (Ctrl+F, Ctrl+B)

How much did it cost to create this file?

I bought an Adobe CC subscription on sale last year for $15/month, this gave me the luxury of working on this project at home rather than the campus computers. Overall, I spent about 2 hours of time in Illustrator on this project including experimentation. This month I’ve spend about 9 hours additional hours in Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop for other projects, so a pro-rated cost would be about $15/11 *2 = $2.72