I truly apologize for the terrible pun (not really). It didn’t mesh the best but what can you do…
Anyway, for the 2D drawing homework, I decided to replicate mechanical movement number 38 from “Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements.”
The original sketch of mechanical movement 38.
As much as I wish that we got Illustrator for free from Rice, we do not, so I had to go find a computer with Illustrator to begin working. At first I had it in my head that only the OEDK had computers with the full Abode build, but Fondren thankfully has the Illustrator as well! This was very important to the project because it saved me a good six minutes of walking time (time that I used to probably be not at all productive.) On my way to Fondren, I saw two friends laying in hammocks in the sun which motivated me to crank out my work and not procrastinate. My first attempt to crank out the homework involved taking the image above and attempting to use image trace to quickly replicate it in Illustrator. This attempt was met with non-existent success. After trying the older version of the book’s drawings, I tried image tracing the newer drawing.
The newer drawing of mechanical movement 38.
Although the new drawing was not nearly as bad as the old drawing when it came to image tracing, image tracing the new drawing did not entirely work. I decided that fixing the broken parts of the vectorized image would actually be harder than recreating the drawing from scratch. At first, I was planning to try to reference the newer drawing on one side of the screen and work on Illustrator on the other side of the screen. Thankfully, I quickly realized that idea was silly and came up with a much better idea. My new and improved idea was to open the newer drawing from the book in Illustrator then use the pen tool to trace the image. When tracing the image, I zoomed in far enough that I could see the individual pixels of the drawing. This allowed me to more accurately use the pen tool to recreate the image because the darker pixels more closely followed the actual path. This method was necessary because when using pixels, the supposedly one dimensional lines actually have width, but the vectors that Illustrator uses are actually one dimensional. When tracing, I tried to replicate the image as closely as possible using the method I just method while also doing my best to replicate sensible geometry. The first circle I did while tracing the gears followed the same method that I used for the teeth. However, I realized right after I finished that circle that Illustrator has a circle drawing tool that is meant for drawing circles (who would have guessed…). Once I came to this simple realization, I used the circle tool for the rest of my circles. Once I did the first gear, I tried to see if I could just copy and paste the first gear to make the second gear. To my dismay, the second gear was just barely off the first gear, so I had to do the second gear as well. I used the same methods to make the second gear. Once I finished the second gear, I called it a day, thinking I was good. Later that night, I realized that the teeth overlapped ever so slightly :'(. The next day while waiting to use the laser cutter, I used the point selection tool to make some quick adjustments. After that, I actually was done!!! The final result is shown below:
My gear drawing when meshed.
My gear drawing when separated.
My drawing as an Adobe Illustrator file: NicholasLesterHW02-2ezrim1
My drawing as a PDF: NicholasLesterHW02-wv7v1z
-Nick
