Cake Display Stand

Timeframe: Summer 2018

In the summer of 2019 my older sister got married and for her wedding she asked me to create a cake stand that involved a dancing couple. I found a CAD model for an appropriate dancing couple and then started on the real work. The first problem to overcome was how to make the model large enough to accommodate the three sizes of cakes it was to support. To determine this I made CAD models of all three cakes and arranged them on a scaled version of the dancing couple and changed the scale of the couple until the cakes fit where I wanted them to.

Once the scale was determined, the model was cut into pieces that would fit in the build volume of my 3d printer. This resulted in the model being printed in ten different pieces. After days (and nights) of printing I was able to join the pieces together using a hot soldering iron and some extra printing filament.

With the plastic shell done, I moved on to build the support structure that would hold the cakes in the proper position. To build the structure I carefully bent 1/4 inch steel rod to run from a steel plate hidden in the base up to each cake position. Once the rod was in the correct place a nut was welded on the end to receive the plate that would hold the cake. Each plate was cut from a thin sheet of steel and had three 1/4 inch support rods welded to it that in turn were welded to a threaded rod to mount it onto the stand.

With all of the structural work done, the entire cake stand was coated in hobby epoxy and sanded to smooth out the ridges from both 3d printing and melting the parts together. once the model was smooth a final coat of paint and clear coat was applied.

This project taught me to be patient and careful when building anything that needs to be visually appealing.