Sydney Opera House USB Holder & Arc de Triomphe Tape Holder

Summary Section:

from your messy, boring, and totally not awesome desk. Well, have you come to the right place or what! This touristy-themed office supply set will solve ALL of your problems. You can store your pencils inside the leaning tower of Pisa, your paper clips inside a beautiful Aztec Temple, your sensitive information inside the Sydney Opera House, and even dispense your tape out of the Arc de Triomf!

I created these office supply organizers along with my partner, Noah as a project for my Introduction to Engineering class. We worked together to help one another troubleshoot problems and brainstorm solutions. Thanks, Noah for helping me out on this project he designed the Aztec Temple and Leaning Tower of Pisa!

Lesson Plan & Activity:

In this project, I used multiple Solidworks tools such as extruded cuts, bases, revolves, offsets, fillets, scaling, as well as linear and circular patterns to recreate famous national landmarks. We designed them to look good but also for practical use, allowing for productivity and leisure.

Specific constraints for all of the builds included:

• Constructing an actual size model of the build in Solidworks
• Limiting the models to a 1000 cm³ volume
• Being 3D printable with little to no supports
• Using all of the following features throughout the project:
  • Extrusion
  • Revolve
  • Sweep
  • Revolve
  • And one of: Mirror Feature or Circular, Linear, and Sketch Pattern

Design Choices for the Sydney Opera House: 

Recreating the Sydney Opera House in SolidWorks was daunting and took many hours. The original plan underwent many changes, and along the way, I saw ways to improve the model so that it looked even better and was closer to the real thing.    

The original plan was to use revolves triangular sketches to recreate the main geometry of the Sydney Opera House however as I began to make them I felt unhappy with the accuracy compared to the original thing. So I decide to use the loft tool using 3 sketches to capture the famous arcs of the Sydney Opera House more accurately.

This was the original concept plan for the Opera House. As you can see the arcs are pretty round and not too accurate due to the limitations of what you can make using only one sketch and the Revolve tool.

This was the sketch I used for the first revolve on the Actual model file I was gonna use. 

This is what it looked like after the revolve. 

These were the three sketches I used to more accurately to recreate the shapes of the Opera House. Using a sketch on the top face of the base and then two reference planes at different angles gave me the geometry I was looking for.

After finishing the sketches and trying to revolve I found that making all the sketches converge on a single line would sometimes give me problems with zero-thickness geometry once I tried lofting the sketches. I fixed this by just adding a gap between the sketches which also helped give the end loft for some more depth.

After lofting this is what it looked like.

The next major redesign I did was later in the design. When connecting the last two arcs in the main arc group I found that using the plan I laid out originally didn't work to really get the geometry I wanted.

Using the import photo tool in SolidWorks I imported a top-down photo of the Sydney Opera House on the base I created to outline the main features of the Opera House. Up until the last two arcs in the main arc group, the outline helped me greatly with where to start and stop each of the sketches. However, in the last two, I encountered a little bit of a problem.

Making the third arc worked great but once I finished the sketches on the fourth arc because both sketches were based on the same point it wouldn’t let me loft the sketches because of zero thickness geometry created at that shared point. I fixed this by just shifting each of the sketches inwards .05 cm so they would no longer be on the same point. After this fix it let me loft both out

After finishing all the arcs it was time to connect them to finish out the looks of them to look like the real thing when I did this I was disappointed by the look of the last two arcs in the main arc group compared to how they looked like in real life and where they merged even despite my guide.

The gap between the two arcs was a lot larger than the real thing. I figured out I could fix this by just pushing out the sketches of the two arcs outward instead of inward. 

This was the result.

A far more accurate and closer-looking model to the original.

The final design change I made to the Opera House was the scale of it. Originally the model was a little too small to comfortably fit the slots for the USB slots but with the scale tool, I was able to fix this very easily.

Before

Length of red line: 12.69 cm

After

Length of red line: 19.55 cm
 

Design Choices for the Arc De Triomphe:

The design process for the ArcDe Triomphe was far simpler than the Sydney Opera House. During the design process, there was only one deviation from the basic laid-out plan I had. 

The complex design on the top of the Arc de Triomphe was a challenge to design and capture the intricacies of it. Originally I decided to do just a far simpler design all away across.

At first, I planned to do this simpler pattern all the way around but I felt that the top pattern on the top added too much that I had to include especially because I thought it was doable.

I ended up designing the first section of the pattern and then using the linear pattern tool to pattern it all the way across. I also decided to keep that simpler pattern on the side to bring it together and not make the top too cluttered. 

Both the Sydney Opera House and the Arc De Triomphe were very demanding but rewarding models to design I think they both came out great and will make an amazing and helpful addition to any office or desk.

Extra Photos:

                                                         Printed Opera House in use

                                                    Section View of Arc De Triomphe