The wireframe of 3D models is widely employed in mesh retrieval, mesh simplification, and mesh reconstruction. The complexity of the existent wireframe generation methods makes it necessary to analyze the geometric features of the mesh model and calculate the surface mesh of the model to obtain the wireframe. This entails a large amount of calculation and sometimes failures to complete the wireframe. To address the problems, a 3D model wireframe extraction method based on axis representation was proposed. Firstly, the axis representation information of the 3D model was extracted, and the corner points of the axis were projected onto the surface of the 3D model. Then, according to the topological relationship of each region, the suitable corner connection relationship was selected, and the projection points were connected to form the wireframe of the model region. After the connection operation, the errors in the projection process were analyzed and corrected. Finally, the region wireframes were merged to obtain the complete wireframe of the 3D model. Through experiments on and comparisons of reconstruction errors of representative 3D mesh models in several model databases, the average re-construction quality of the proposed method is about 10% higher than the three methods, outperforming the existing wireframe extraction methods in reconstruction quality and wireframe information integrity.