This week I put my Illustrator skills to the test by translating parts of a pendulum into a digital file so that it can be fabricated on a laser cutter. Since I am experienced with Adobe Illustrator, this task was not too challenging. However, I have never worked in Illustrator as a 2D CAD program, so it was very useful for me to work on translating images into digital files at exactly the right scale. One of the most useful tools I used were the grid, which I set to a scale that matched the scale on the book’s plans, with a gridline every 1 inch, or 72 points.  I also enjoyed using the smart guides and snap to grid option. One interesting thing to me was that the plans had different scales for different parts. As you can see, the toothed wheel is much smaller in my drawing than in the book, because it was scaled twice as much in the book as the other parts.

As you can see in the scan above, there is a wide variety of shapes in the pendulum plans, ranging from rectangles and semi-circles to pointy wheels, parabolic curves, and irregular arcs. I liked the challenge of creating these shapes out of geometric shapes, and then using the shape builder tool to combine them to make more irregular forms. The hardest part to translate into a digital shape was the anchor and the toothed wheel (gear shape). For the toothed wheel, I used the line tool to create lines at the angle of each gear, manually entering the angle degree into the input box. There are 22 gears, so each angle was 16.366 degrees. I had an internal circle that was centered on the origin of these 22 lines. I then drew a larger circle with the same center point and used the pen tool to connect the intersection of the lines with the outer circle with the intersection of the next line over with the inner circle. Then I used the shape builder tool to connect the triangles with the inner circle and eliminate scrap from the outer circle. This was a fast and easy way to make the irregular gear shape.