3D print the Desert View Watchtower
A free, printable model of Desert View Watchtower, a round stone tower beside a low round building, with the sloping ground around it, generated from real map data in your browser.
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North
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East
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South
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West
- Real height
- 21 m
- On a 160 mm print
- 6 mm
- Scale
- 1:3,750
21 m of the Desert View Watchtower, 6 mm on your shelf
Make this print opens the generator on a 600 m square around the landmark. Buildings print at close to true scale, so the landmark grows with the print size.
- Stone courses and tiny windows
Fine stone courses and tiny windows cover the tower and its low round base. Print friendly adapts small details to the print scale; Full detail keeps them, which suits a larger print.
- Uneven rim at the top
The tower's top edge is uneven, and the round base has a thin raised rim. Layers of 0.12 to 0.16 mm keep these edges crisp, and a bigger print size keeps more of them.
- One piece with the ground
The Desert View Watchtower is joined to the ground in the exported file, and the four-side check found no floating parts, so nothing needs gluing.
- Pick the detail for your nozzle
In the Buildings settings, set Landmark detail to Print friendly to adapt thin parts and small details to the print scale. Full detail keeps every modeled feature, for larger prints or a finer nozzle.
- Colors
Buildings, roads, water and ground arrive as separate filament slots in the 3MF. The Desert View Watchtower takes the building color.
- File format
You get a 3MF for Bambu Studio, OrcaSlicer or PrusaSlicer. Any of them can save it as STL if you need one.
About the Desert View Watchtower
Desert View Watchtower is a stone building 21 m (70 ft) high. It sits on the Grand Canyon's South Rim, inside Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, and its other name is the Indian Watchtower at Desert View. It stands at Desert View, more than 32 km (20 miles) east of Grand Canyon Village, the main developed area, toward the park's east entrance. The four-story structure was completed in 1932. Its interior contains murals by Fred Kabotie.
Mary Colter, an American architect employed by the Fred Harvey Company, designed it. She also created many other buildings near the canyon, among them the Lookout Studio and Hermit's Rest. The tower was made to resemble an Ancestral Puebloan watchtower, though it is far larger than any known Puebloan-built tower. A circular tower of coursed masonry rises from a rubble base that was intentionally given a partly ruinous look, as if an older structure lay beneath it.
Colter spent six months researching archaeological prototypes and construction techniques and studied the design in a clay model. Before the design was final she had a 21 m (70 ft) platform built to test the views from the site. Inside, the tower is an open shaft, with circular balconies lining it and small stairways between them, and small windows in the shaft admit beams of light to the space below. The Watchtower belongs to the M.E.J. Colter Buildings, a National Historic Landmark, and to the Desert View Watchtower Historic District.
About this model
The Desert View Watchtower is one of more than 4,300 landmark models in Mini Skyline. They are made with AI, and each one is checked from four sides in its real surroundings before release. Everything around it is built from OpenStreetMap and Overture map data. If you would rather print the shape from map data, turn off Landmark models in the Buildings settings.
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