For this assignment, we are supposed to create 2-D drawings, with good  geometric and dimensional precision of the parts of a wood from a woodworking book. In my case, I chose the “Cam and Fork Machine” from  “Building Wooden Machines” by Alan & Gill Bridgewater (which is project #3 in the book).

This machine transforms circular motion in linear oscillatory motion using a eccentric cylinder (which can also be called a “cam”).  The fork is the part that touches the cylinder and oscillates with the same frequency of the circular motion.

In this video, we can see the machine working:

The machine is composed of 9 parts.

1-Pillars

2-Fork

3-Disk Cam

4-Cam Post

5-Crank

6-Base

7-Crank Handle

8-End-of-pills rods

9-Rods

My work on Illustrator contains just the first 5 parts that are the ones that I have a precise drawing to use as a reference. For the other parts, except for the rods, that are 24″ 3/8″ dowels, the geometry is not really important for the machine to work properly(for example, the purposed base is a rectangle, but it will also works if I decide to use a circle or a ellipse as base). That’s why I think that the 5 parts I draw on Illustrator are more important and the others can be considered in a later stage of the design.

To draw those parts on Adobe Illustrator, I used mainly predefined shapes and the subtraction and union tools (in the pathfinder window). For part 1 and 5 I had also to use the shape builder tool to create shapes from lines. The corner rounding tool was also very useful when drawing 1.

Below, I am attaching 2 files. The .ai file is the file with just the drawings, that can be used on the laser cutter. The .pdf file contains numbers on the drawings that indicates which draw represents which part, according to the enumeration above.

Wood machine (.ai file)

Wood machine(2) (.pdf file)