Aug 17, 2015 | By Simon
When it comes to preserving historical artifacts such as those found in museums or private collections, we’ve seen time and time again how the use of 3D technologies including 3D scanning and 3D printing can be used to both archive these artifacts as well as produce replicas that can be held, touched and shared in ways that the original artifacts never would. Additionally, creating 3D printable models is also a way of bringing some of these large scale items down to tabletop size.
More recently, Thingiverse user ‘stylesuxx’ won a Thingiverse challenge based on international landmarks with a 3D printable version of Vienna’s Riesenrad (Giant Wheel) - one of the city’s most widely-known landmarks that was originally built in 1897. Located at the entrance of the amusement park "Prater" in Vienna's second district, the Riesenrad proudly held the title of the world’s tallest ferris wheel until 1985, when it was replaced with the Cosmo Clock 21 in Yokohama.
Impressively, the Riesenrad was able to last through World War II, however it did suffer some significant damage. In order to keep the costs of rebuilding and operating the wheel down, the original 30 gondolas were reduced to 15 and the wheel has since continued to operate with 15 gondolas.
Motivated to rebuild the Riesenrad in such a way that it could be easily adapted for a variety of different sizes while still maintaining as much detail as possible, ‘stylesuxx’ turned to OpenScad to create a scalable 3D model of the iconic wheel.
“I think that building the giant wheel at the time it was originally constructed was quite an accomplishment,” he explains. “A massive steel construction, that is round and moves, how could one not like and admire it?”
Once he had modeled the individual components of the wheel’s assembly, printing was done using the OctoPrint software, which allowed him to send Push Bullet notifications when a print job was done. In total, this included the 15 gondolas with each consisting of a body and a roof, which took roughly six hours to print, the wheel itself, which took roughly sixteen hours and of course, the stands to hold the wheel which took roughly twelve hours.
“I joined the challenge a week before the deadline and knew from the beginning that I will need to use time for printing effectively,” he said on his Thingiverse project page. “The print times do not account for prototypes I had to do for every part, just plain printing time of the parts. After prototyping the single parts I arranged them in such a way that allowed me to print all or at least a considerable number of them together.”
Using the OctoPrint software, he was able to leave his home in the morning and start printing a batch which allowed him to do other things in the meantime. During the evening hours, he was able to quickly prototype the parts so that he could continue 3D printing the final parts through the night and into the next day in order to finish the challenge on time.
“I set an alarm for the notification coming from the printer to wake me up and remove the parts from the printing bed and start a new print job before going to bed again,” he says. “Or in my case, the couch, since my girlfriend was not all too amused about waking up every couple of hours, and me coming back smelling like hairspray.”
Once all of the parts had been printed, he lightly cleaned them before painting - which took approximately 15 minutes for each of the gondolas alone for a total of over 4 hours for all of the gondolas....not including the dry time between each stage.
As for the final assembly, once all of the pieces had dried, over 8 hours were spent assembling all of the pieces into a final, working model. Although attaching the individual parts wasn’t necessarily a time-consuming process, aligning the wheels to the center so that the final assembly could rotate properly was.
At over 65 meters high, the Riesenrad is clearly one of the tallest and most recognizable landmarks in Austria. For those who may not be able to make it over to Vienna any time soon - or even those who have been on the Riesenrad already - this incredible model is a perfect excuse to fire up the 3D printer and create a tabletop model.
To download the STL files, head over to the project's Thingiverse page.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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