Iron Man Mk.3 Arc Reactor (made with a minimum of tools)

[GasMaskSaxon]

Glad I can finally post this on here. It's a present for a friend who has made his own Iron Man Mk.3 suit from EVA foam. He's done a cracking job, but it's missing its arc reactor and repulsors. Since he hasn't finished the hands yet, I offered to make his arc reactor, since I've done more work with metals and acrylics than him.

I wanted to make a arc reactor that wasn't just fairly faithful to the screen version, but also had some lighting effects. I've seen his suit, and the space for the arc reactor is plenty big enough for the reactor itself, but there's not a whole bunch of spare space for electronics. A brief search of Arduino's shop turned up the Arduino Mini, which uses the same ATmega328 chip as the Uno, but is really really small. Having decided that would be the board I'd use, I cracked out the Uno I'd bought for my GLaDOS ceiling lamp (watch this space) and wrote up a program which would do a power-up/power-down lighting effect using flicker-and-fade. When I asked if he planned to motorise the faceplate, he said yes, so I also wrote in a couple of servos. I haven't actually bought the new board yet, but since the cosmetic side of things has just been wrapped up, the electronics won't be far behind.

Another thing I had to do with this project was design everything with a mind to not really using any tools. I'm at university, without any real tools, and my family are currently moving house, so most of our big (and very useful) tools are in storage. Therefore, in order to keep the already fairly considerable cost down, I was confined to my multitool and scissors to make this. It was fun in its own way, but I wouldn't recommend it in a hurry.

So, here it is.



The outer surround is a 100mm OD x 6mm Wall iron ring. It should have been a brighter metal like aluminium, but aluminium rings like that are impossible to get in the UK without spending AT LEAST £50, which I just can't afford. So I settled on this iron ring, which was much much cheaper. The plastic fronting is the bottom of a Petri dish, cut out and filed to fit into the iron ring. I was scavenging or recycling material wherever I could to keep costs down, and it all seems to have worked.

The inner ring with all the holes in it is Worbla. Without a drill, I couldn't use a material that needed a drill to make holes. Worbla came to the rescue once again, being strong enough for the job, but it was possible to make the holes using a simple holepunch. In fact, most of that central ring assembly is made of various Worbla shapes, except for the bright central ring, which is MDF, and the bolts, which are...well, bolts. There's a length of coiled magnet wire underneath the whole thing, hot-glued to the bolts. The wire wrapping in the centre is the same wire.

The metal arms around the edge are made from sheet tin, cut with ordinary kitchen scissors and filed to fine-tune the shape. Cutting 20 of those was not a whole lot of fun. These were then glued in pairs to a bracket made of gold card, and slotted onto a ring cut from 6mm Perspex. Again, I had no hole saws or anything, so that ring was cut roughly using a red-hot knife, then filed and sanded to shape. Ugly work, but effective. I frosted it just by sanding it. Simple copper wire was wrapped over the card bracket and around the Perspex ring, securing the metal arms in place. Small pieces of more magnet wire were then glued between tabs on the card brackets.

Then to fixing the centre part into the outer surround. The ID of the ring was *slightly* larger than than the outside of the centre piece, so I layered more gold card around the inside to bulk it out, allowing the centre part to fit snugly. I slotted it in and glued it where the metal arms touched the sides, just to keep it secure. Finally, a lens was sanded from the same 6mm Perspex and frosted using sandpaper and wet/dry paper.

Electronics will be done soon, so keep checking back for that. Hopefully I'll be able to post a video here, but we'll see.

 

[GasMaskSaxon]

Actually managed to get the lights done today! Found the LEDs had arrived, so went out, bought myself a new soldering iron (my old one broke just as I was about to start..) and got to work.

I was soldering 12 surface-mount LEDs to a circle of PCB material. They look like this:


That little blip on the end of my finger? Yeah, 12 of those. But I only broke/lost/crushed about 8 of the 25 I bought, so it wasn't too bad. The PCB circle was segregated into two 'tracks': one would be the positive side, the other would be the negative. The negative portion was in the middle of the circle, but since there were going to be two LEDs in the centre, I added an appendage to the positive track that extended to the centre point. I also carved a small notch into the centre lens I made earlier to let the two middle LEDs sit inside it a little.

When done, I soldered two leads, one for each track, glued on the reactor, plugged it in to my Uno, loaded with the sketch I'd written, and fired it up.



Unfortunately I can't post a video here, the file's too big.

I'm really happy with the way this has turned out. Can't wait to see how it looks in the suit.

 

[GasMaskSaxon]

Forgot to say: this build would have been a LOT harder without this fantastic instructable. If you're looking to build your own reactor, this is a good place to look.