Iron Man Mk 39 Starboost PVC/EVA Built

Hello everybody,

In this thread I will be documenting the complete build of my Iron Man Mk 39 Starboost armor.

I will keep the first post updated, so that new people can see the overall progress and don´t need to scroll through the entire thread.

Progress September 2015:



Torso and electronics for the torso are complete.


Content:



Original 1st Post:

So today is Sunday and I finally have some time to work on my Armor. Ive been cutting out the various pieces out of pcv over the last week and really like the results so far.
Still having problems with gluing parts together though. Today I started working on the EVA Foam parts and absolutely fell in love with the material. First of all the Texture looks great combined with the matte white pained PVC parts and it is very nice to work with. Hopefully next time I can show you the complete backpack, but we´ll see how I progress.

Also quick tip for people who try to paint PVC: Sand the material with 300grid sandpaper and the paint will stick much better to the surface. i did some testing and it works great.

I´ve been working on a custom Arc reactor this entire morning. it turned out pretty nice, now I only have to find somebody with a lasercutter! I did a quick drawing in SketchUp to see what it will look like. It is built out of 5 layers of acrylic and lit with LEDs behind the ring. It fits perfectly into the armor since i drew it from real world measurements.
Also the front of the torso is almost complete, now I only have to finish the jet engines and the biggest piece of the armor will be done. Should take me about 2-3 more days, depending on how productive I feel! See you in the next one!

coming along nicely :thumbsup

Off to an awesome start,Cri7e :thumbsup keep it up

Thanks for the kind words, Warmachine2000 and George , its always nice to have some feedback!

Im moving to a new city by the end of the month, thats why I want to finish at least the torso by then, so I dont have to move the various pieces to the new place!

The last couple of days have been quite successfull, I have already finished big parts of the back of the torso. The last big things I have to finish are the side pieces, which unfortunately I cannot paint right now because its getting a little bit cold here in Germany and the paint wont stick to the cold plastic, when painted outside. So we will see when I can paint those. I really dont want to spray inside.....

I continued building the rear jet engines and various pieces needed at the back of the torso. The black pieces of the second picture will be drilled and I will put some light behind to make it glow, like if you would actually run the engines. Same goes for the main engines. Inspired by MasterLe Im thinking about putting in a system to have some kind of CO2 Jet Engine imitation. A Video to that can be found on his Youtube Channel.

Also I stepped up my YouTube game and started to post timelapse videos of me building the suit. I started a little late but better late than never, because I think it is always helpful to people to get some insight on how things are made, if they want to make their own. I watched a lot of tutorials on Cosplay myself so I want to share my knowledge aswell.

The video can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3xKB9nR934


Talk to everybody soon!

Man, that looks sharp! Really well done! And it's really cool that you're uploading time lapses, too!

Can't wait for more progress on this build :thumbsup

Work is coming along nicely and the torso should be complete by the end of the week. The progress that still takes the longest is for the PVC glue to dry off. I can only work for like 15min and then have to wait until the next day until its dry. I have tried to use hot glue but it warps the PVC and the parts come apart after a while. I know that there is a superglue that "melts" PVC together, I have seen some companies use it but I dont know where to buy it. I have not found it anywhere on the Internet.

I did not take a whole lot of pictures due to the fact that Im constantly filming, but more crisp pictures will come in the future, since I just ordered a OnePlus One as my new phone. The good old Nexus 4 has ages quite a bit and the cameras are utter crap nowadays!

I had to make a lot of custom pieces at the back and really did not pay attention to the pepakura model anymore. Nothing fit together as it should, since I probably left out some bends that the Pep model needed to go together, so in the end, I went my own route of making everything fit together nicely. Now it is not 100% accurate to what the Mk 39 in the film looks like but to be honest, I never opted for that in the first place. I still think it looks great, you will see the results soon.
Also I have to note that i usually dont film the endless hours of experimenting and trimming and fitting in my videos, because I think that is quite boring to watch, but just so that you guys know, there has already been put a lot of work into each individual piece, before I can glue it together as easily as it seems in my videos.

Also I almost forgot: I found a place that has a Laser Cutter and other various CNC Machines and 3D Printers, its close tho the city where I live now and I will soon be cutting my custom arc reactor. These workshops are called FabLabs (not fap ) and are free to use. They are especially made for makers and as a member you can go there as often as you want and use everything in the workshop. I already heard of more projects to open such Workshops and I gotta say I just love the fact, that the maker movement is growing so fast and its awesome to be a part of it. So nice to see people realize, that it is way more fun to just make something instead of going out and buying it at a store.

I got in touch with a really nice guy working there and he will help me with the laser cutter. Now all I have to do is to complete my drawings of the arc reactor and I should be good to go. I can even buy the acrylics there.

Also make sure to check out my new Timelapse, in case you are interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmHVIOwB07A

While I am still working on finishing the main torso before I move, i decided to share my progress on the Arc reactor.
I finally found time to visit the FabLab in a city nearby. I met a lot of incredible people, all sharing the same interests and having a lot of great knowledge and tips. I had a great time and made a lot of new friends. I encourage everybody to visit your nearby makerspace and to just interact with other people, loving the same stuff! It helps so much.

A guy there helped me to prepare my files for the laser cutter, he was very nice and a great help since I had never cut anything like that before. I sent him my 2D files and he converted them into a format for the laser cutter. Everything went smoothly and my files worked great. Complete cutting time was about 9min. There is nothing more enjoyable than watching a thing you created on the computer to become reality. The laser cutter cut the 3mm acrylic with no problem. Only the white diffusor plate was cut on my little table saw.

The LEDs are placed behind the ring so that you cannot see them directly. They illuminate the arc very well. Around the thinner sections of the ring, I will be wrapping copper wire and put some black mesh in the middle, as seen in the drawings of my earlier post.

I will be filming more timelapses today, Im almost done with the torso, but editing takes some time so we will see when that will happen.

See you in the next one!

2nd post today? really? yeah I´ve been super busy working on the arc reactor and managed to completely finish it today (along with a lot of other things that I will soon talk about).

I painted the middle section of the arc reactor with a base coat of flat black and put silver on top. The color is really the one most arc reactors have. After that I stripped down some copper wire and shaped it around a rectangular metal stick. I cut out little U-shaped pieces and glued every single piece onto the ring.

After that I found a nice looking meshed plate and I think it looks perfect on the middle of the arc. All I had to do was paint it flat black aswell.
In the end I did some light weathering and held all the pieces together with black duck tape.

I think the results speak for itself. Im incredibly happy with how it turned out and it looks way better than I have ever imagined.

Please feel free to leave your comments and thoughts below, I feel like I´m talking to myself here

some really nice clean work :thumbsup

The photos speak for themselves looks great,Cri7e
Can't wait for the next update

Dude, I love the custom arc reactor. It looks great!

Thanks stigmorgan, George And Warmachine2000 ,

if anyone wants to make such an ARC reactor, feel free to hit me up and I will send you the .pdf files.

The torso is finally completely assembled, it all went together great, even though I had to modify some pieces to make them fit.

It is very sturdy and should not come apart any time soon. I had to make little custom pieces to fill up the various small gaps, but over all im very proud with my work.

I want to add decals, to be specific, the red "Intakes" logos above the intakes. Does anybody have an idea how to make such decals? I dont want to cut the letters out by hand, that seems like a big pain in the a**.

I will post two one more update and two more videos before I move, but as for the time being, thats probably it from me for a while. Im moving next week and have to get used to university and the new environment first. I will contunie working on the Armor, mainly cutting out all the PVC pieces so that I can pray paint them in spring and continue my work when the weather starts to get warmer again. Maybe, if I am very lucky, i can find a place to spray all my stuff inside, then the Updates should come more frequent but Im not sure about that yet.

I hope you all enjoy following my work. I love the feedback from you guys.

New Video is up:

Iron Man Mk 39 #003 Torso Assembly Timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oafthe269fY

Also I updated the first post, so that people can navigate through the tread more easily.

wow i didnt know ur from germany as well! I've been following your builds. this one is definitey my favorite! u gonna be finished until german comicon this dec? it'd be awesome if we could run around as ironmen ^^

markseven
Yeah great to meet some people living close! I probably will not finish until then, my plan is to go as Iron Man to Cologne GamesCom 2016, hope that will work out. I tend to take some time with my builds, even if I try to rush them, I just cant build faster! xD

That torso came out great! nice work