Eiffel Tower Made From Recycled Sheet Metal

For my Upcycle project, I will be making an Eiffel Tower from leftover sheet metal in the BTU (Blow Things Up) Lab. Last semester I took a class called Material Studies and Practice. In this class we had a metal unit where I learn how to spot weld, angle grind, use rivets etc. to work with metal. For the metal project in this class I made an Eiffel Tower out of sheet metal (I think it’s galvanized steel)

I had a lot of fun doing this project, but wasn’t very satisfied with the end result as It doesn’t resemble the Eiffel Tower enough. I’m excited to take this opportunity to learn from my mistakes and make another version. My inspiration to give this project another attempt came from classmate David Whisnant where he talked about the sheet metal working aesthetic in our breakout room. David wrote his first post on this aesthetic which you can find here https://www.aesdes.org/2025/01/22/sheet-metal-working-aesthetic/. The process of the first attempt went as such: cutting with shears, Filing, bending with block of wood and vice, drilling with drill press and oil, using the spot welder, and using rivets which I broke the thing and had to fix it after it was a pain. I also soldered lights into it. My original inspiration for this was from a dream. Maybe going to bed thinking of what metal object I could make, my brain instantly thought of the Eiffel Tower. My goal to improve this project is making it look more 3d and potentially adding texture. I will do this by following a design more like the photo below, I can also add texture with the angle grinder with a specific wheel. A member of my breakout group has extra soda can tabs that I might be able to incorporate for added texture. The holes in the tabs may slightly resemble the holes in the tower. I think using these could make the overall aesthetic much more pleasing than some janky scrap metal (as my craft is not advanced.) This method would also hide some of the imperfections from tools like the sheers. For the lights, I accidentally used two blue lights which is why they don’t show up on camera. I want to add more lights and maybe make them flash like the actual tower. To do this, I would need to add an Arduino Nano into the build somewhere, hook up the lights to it and a switch, and run blink code. This would need to be much more organized, opposed to the dangling wires I had on v1. Hopefully from this redesign I will be much happier with the end result. I still have v1 in my apartment so my goal is for the aesthetic of v2 to blow v1 out of the water. Working with metal is a tedious yet rewarding process and I envy anyone who attempts it for this class without prior knowledge.