For the 2D Drawing Lab, I chose to reproduce Mechanical Movement #211 from 501 Mechanical Movements in Adobe Illustrator. This design is described on the website as: “A continuous rotary motion of the large wheel [that] gives an intermittent rotary motion to the pinion-shaft.”

 

To start my design I first planned to use the original design from Henry T. Brown. However after further inspection, I determined this design would not be adequate. Brown’s drawn design does not allow the gears to mesh without jamming. Therefore, I chose to import the animated design into Adobe Illustrator (Figure 1). After performing an image trace on this version, I decided that there were too many imperfections in the traced image of this version to be adequate for reproduction. I decided to create my own version.

 

 

First, I used geargenerator.com to create two gears of similar dimension to that of the animated version of Brown’s design (Figure 2). Then using the dimension tool, I measured the radii of both gears and several other distances (Figure 3 ). These dimensions allowed me to transform my gears by scaling them to be exact size replicas. From here, the work got a little more complicated.

I decided to work on the larger gear first. I started by drawing a concentric circle around the larger gear and then drawing a line bisecting the large circle and gear. Then by using the snipping tool I was able to remove half of the circle and half of the gear. This left with me with a half circle half gear hybrid (Figure 4 ).I then used the path finder tool to unite my circle-gear hybrid into one shape. At this point, it was very close to the animated version of Brown’s design. I was only missing the sloped portions that joined the circle to the teeth of the gear (Figure 5). To create these pieces, I copied my trace of the Brown’s animated version behind my larger gear and used it as a guide to manually draw these pieces onto my gear. Once these pieces were drawn, I used the snipping tool to remove some extra teeth and the pathfinder too to unite the manually drawn sections with my large gear. Lastly, I put the finishing touches on the gear by using the direct select tool to round out the sharp corners of my gear. The work on the smaller gear was much simpler.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First I placed the gear in the correct position corresponding to my earlier measurements that overlapped with the larger gear. At this point, I used the pathfinder and snipping tool to remove the portion of smaller gear that was overlapping with the larger gear. To create the guide-piece, I used my trace of the Brown’s animated version as guide to manually draw my guide piece.

 

All in all, I found this lab challenging but enjoyable. Since I utilized a gear generator and Brown’s working animated design, I do not have any concerns with the functionality of my design. I believe that these gears would work properly if a physical version was created.

Download the AI file: Mech-Movement-211