This week we were tasked to convert components of a mechanical wooden device from already-made designs into two-dimensional drawing using Adobe Illustrator. I decided to make illustrations of a six-valve engine working engine, the blueprints of which are shown below.

The components of this device can all be laser cut, incidentally, although this week it was only necessary to create a two-dimensional drawing. My first step was to import the file into Adobe Illustrator and orienting it the way I wanted using the place command.

I then attempted to use Illustrator’s tracing abilities to trace over the file–the blueprints scanned in as .pdf files, which appear as rasterized images in Illustrator rather than vector images, the final format that I wanted to work with.

(Clicking on the photo will lead to a larger photo, allowing for better resolution/detail). I found that tracing the image was quite difficult, as the grid lines showed patchily even after attempting mixes of color thresholds. Furthermore, the path orientation of most of the pieces was odd, and attempting to modify some groups of anchors deleted other groups of anchors almost arbitrarily. After attempting to work with the traced vectors for a while, I concluded that, while a useful tool, the trace function would not be the best approach to converting these blueprints into Illustrator.

Rather, I decided to reconstruct the files myself, using Adobe’s shape generator and pen functions to create my own paths or anchors. I made these shapes on a separate layer from the original blueprint, and used varying opacity settings for my layers so that I could see the blueprints as I drew the shapes on top of the originals, shown below:

Many of these components are circular in nature, or can be constructed from a combination of circles and linear paths. This made drawing the pieces much easier, as using the CTRL and SHIFT keys allowed for easy placement of concentric circles. I also used transforms to rotate the pieces that were oriented at sixty degree angles to ensure that they would fit properly together. For example, the individual, ungrouped paths of the engine body piece are shown below:

Using the pathfinder tool, I grouped individual pieces together to make a full piece. For instance, with the backing disc, shown below, using the “minus front” combination grouped the smaller white pieces on top of the black backing disc, effectively making white holes in the surface of the disc.

Overall, this project was fairly straightfoward. I found that the tracing tool did not work well with the grid layout of the original blueprints, although it is undoubtedly an invaluable tool in the future.

A final image of my pieces overlaid with the original blueprints is shown below:

Also attached is a copy of my file, in .pdf format. My understanding is that it can be opened in multiple layers in Illustrator as well.