8. As soon as you click the mouse button the pointer will change to a radial shape similar to the screen shot below. Release the mouse.

9. When you release the mouse button, there will be five evenly spaced lines radiating from a single point.

10. Select the Elipse tool and create four concentric circles. For each circle, click on the same grid intersection as before, then hold the Shift and Option (Macintosh) / Alt (Windows) keys while dragging. Holding the Shift key will constrain them to a circular shape and holding the Option / Alt key will draw the circles from the center point outwards. The spacing of the circles will be even in this tutorial because we are using a grid. The exact specifications in a drawing you may do may call for a different spacing. For simplicity we'll use the grid spacing in this tutorial.

11. Select the five radiating lines.

12. Bring up the Stroke Inspector. The required width for the stroke will be unique for each situation, but for this tutorial we'll use a stroke of 16 points.

13. This will fatten the lines to create the necessary spacing between the arcs that form the grate.

14. FreeHand requires closed paths when combining objects. One quck way to do this is to expand the stroke of the five lines. Click Modify > Alter Path > Expand Stroke.... In the dialog click "OK" and , accept the width of the lines (16 points in this case).

15. Next, combine the five separate closed paths into a single closed path by clicking Modify > Combine > Union.

16. Now select the four concentric circles. If you are using FreeHand 9 you can double-click the Pointer tool and set it up to be Contact Sensitive. By doing so you can easily select all four circles at once by dragging the Pointer tool in a manner similar to the screen shot shown below.

17. When the four concentric circles are selected, your screen should look similar to the example below.

18. Once again bring up the Stroke Inspector and choose a stroke width of 8 points for the circles. The exact specifications of a drawing you may be making may require a different stroke, but for this tutorial we will use 8 points.

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