For this assignment, we were tasked to create a 2D drawing on Adobe illustrator of a machine. The machine I chose for this assignment is a manual punch machine and this is my illustrator drawing of its components:

My drawing does not include the dowels needed to assemble all the components together.

Before I started drawing the components on Illustrator, I wanted to work out the exact dimensions for each component. I plan on building this machine for my midterm project so I wanted to be sure that when I laser cut the parts, it would fit together perfectly. I took note of the dimensions given in the book and used the grid lines to help me approximate some of the dimensions that were not given explicitly. Once I got all the dimensions down, I started working on my drawings.

First, I opened the scanned drawings from the book on Illustrator. Some of the components have weird shapes so, initially, I wanted to trace each shape using a pen but, I realized that I could create them by combining different basic shapes together. For example, I merged a rectangle and a circle to form the tall-round top backboard. I used this method for all of the parts I drew. However, some parts weren’t that simple to draw. Rectangles and circles were easy to draw and re-size but I manually drew each triangle by tracing the shape on the scanned image. I then re-sized it to its correct dimensions since the scanned drawing was not to scale. Finally, I used the curvature tool to draw the curved ends of the triangles and merged the shape with circles or rectangles where necessary.

Overall, this assignment was challenging yet rewarding at the same time. I have never used illustrator before using it for this assignment so it took me a while to learn all the hot keys and where certain tools are located. Once I knew where everything was, drawing the components became a lot easier and took less time. Now that I know how to use Illustrator, I would definitely be using it to create more things in the near future!

.ai file of my punch machine: punch-machine