For our third homework assignment I chose to make a 2D model of a bike chain. The specific project is the “The Bicycle Chain Machine” in Building Wooden Machines by Alan and Gill Bridgewater. I am certainly a bike enthusiast, and these plans really drew me in. Here is a scan of the project:
I built all 7 shapes from scratch. The tools I used were mainly draw, shape builder, ellipse, rectangle, live corners, path finder, rotate, and mirror. It was so cool to see what complex shapes I could create from such simple foundation shapes. I chose not to use Live Trace to make each of my shapes because I wanted to learn how to use a lot of Adobe Illustrator’s tools and functions rather than just one. Building off of base shapes also makes it easier to rescale your drawings if you need to, which was appealing to me.
I have some experience with making models in Rhino, and while designing things on Illustrator is often times sort of similar, many functions are present on one program and not the other, or are formatted differently. I had a fun time applying things I had learned in Rhino to a new project while also learning a new skill set on Illustrator. One of the biggest frustrations I had while switching between these two programs was the lack of a tool on Illustrator that was present on Rhino. I forget the name of the tool, but it allowed you to place objects in a repeating fashion on the edge of a circle. This would have been very helpful while creating the gear, but I figured out a way to do it in illustrator using rotated lines and circles that was still pretty effective. Here is an image of this process: 
Another thing that I had to learn was how to join two circles with rounded edges. You’ll see in an upcoming photo that 3 of the 7 shapes I had to build used this concept. I spent a long time googling how to do this, but after awhile I asked a friend who is an Illustrator whiz to show me some tricks. Claire O’Malley showed me how to use the pen tool and shape builder tool to create shapes that could be fit into angular corners to make them appear round.
The Adobe creative suite is a powerful group of programs. I learned how to use Premiere Pro over the summer (the Adobe video editing program), but I think Illustrator has more applications to my mechanical engineering degree, so I am glad that I am now able to use it.
In the end, I switched from pink fill to black, but I think the crank set/chain still looks awesome! (And pretty close to the original if I do say so myself…) Here is a screenshot of my final product:
And here is a link to the .ai file:
