I made this eiffel tower for fun while I was working at New Valence Robotics Corporation. One motivation to make it, other than that the Eiffel Tower is a beautiful piece of engineering, was to explore the capabilities of the small, inexpensive 3D printers we were using at the time.
I started by downloading a CAD from thingiverse and printing it. However I didn’t like the result:
This design looked really good in the computer, but it wasn’t caded with 3D printing in mind. It was basically the intersection of two 2D objects at 90˚, so it had many small, unnecessary internal features that even with very expensive 3D printers would have taken longer than desired to print. So I decided to cad it myself in SolidWorks to produce a design that was both cleaner and manageable for our 3D printers. I traced an actual picture of the Eiffel Tower and started from there. The larger features are all realistic, i.e. their shape and proportions are true, except for the rails on the first level platform and the number of trusses.
CAD process:
3D-printing:
I had to print it in three parts to achieve the desired size due to the size limitation of our printers.
Now it’s decorating my desk.
Amado Antonini 