The Queen Elizabeth Tower
- aka “Big Ben”

Big Ben is actually the large bell that lives in the tower that houses the Great Clock of Westminster, but I grew up calling it Big Ben. This is probably because at the time, it was just called The Clock Tower. In 2012, it was renamed after the Queen during her Diamond Jubilee (the one where she* jumped out of a helicopter). The bell and the tower are synonymous at this point.

I built this from a model I found on makerworld. I had to print a few extra bits, such as a base with slots for the LED cord to poke out of. I later singed the base with my soldering iron.

The build took the best part of a week to do off and on, even with two printers. Mostly because I started with a “stone” filament that was too dark and switched to a sand color that was more appropriate and had to reprint a lot of it. Putting it all together took a couple of days including time for glue to set, figuring out where things went, and printing extra pieces. I also custom printed the clock hands by finding close up images on the internet and asking Gemini to create 3mf files that I edited in Flash Studio.

I had *most of what I needed lying around in my spare parts drawer to build out the integrated chimes - an ESP32, a DFPlayer, a microSD, and dozens of resistors and jumper wires… plus, the soldering iron was already plugged in (which is how the base got singed) - but I thought: hold on, this is arguably the world’s most famous clock tower… someone has put these chimes in a clock before. 30 seconds of googling and I’d found a pre-made kit for $15 with 4 different variants of the chimes!

This was fun and also frustrating to build. There weren’t very detailed instructions, but the pictures were detailed enough. The tricky part was figuring out how to attach the clock mechanisms to each clock face without them showing through once the lights were switched on, but I figured it out. It required positioning the lights on the outer rim of each clock face, covering the clock mechanisms in a white casing, and setting them back from the clock faces by about 1cm so the light is cast across the clock face. Any light that hits the mechanism is bounced back out by the white casing.

The model is completely level and straight - but guess what isn’t? My floors. So if it looks slightly askew, we can blame the 100 year old building I live in.

Keep scrolling for more pictures.

Click here to see Other Things I Have Printed.

* stunt double.