ok so this project started out as something quick and simple but it ended up taking all day to complete.
To go with my iron man suit i wanted the infamous arc reactor tony stark has to stay alive as well as to power the suit.
i began by making a 3d model
then printed out all the parts and started the process of building and piecing it all together.
at this stage i had to kep all the pieces seperate as i knew i wanted to add lighting to this particular project. but lighting adds a whole new challenge. I designed the arc reactor to be as slim as possible due to the fact i dont have a great amount of room to put it within the suit, but also wanted to stick somewhat close to the movie prop even though this will prop never get seen apart from the front.
the thin ring peice here
is where the LED's will be housed....the problem is that piece is around 5mm thick, a lot thinner than your average LED, but thats a good thing in a way cause i can have the LED protruding without it being too much of a problem. in the end it was barely big enough to store all the wireing that joined the LED's together.
i dont have any pics of the next couple of steps i kind of rushed through it and forgot to document it.
essentially what i did was take each component, spray it with 2 layers of resin hardener so its dureable and then a base layer of black paint followed by 2 layers of silver and 2 layers of clear.
for the actual housing around each of the lights i originally planned on using frosted acetate, but when it came to it i thought it might look kind of rustic to just use layers of hot glue, so thats exactly what i did. just pumped a load of hot glue into each of the sections containing LED's totally covering them and the final model looks something like this
wich i am extremely happy with, it fits in the space in the suit perfectly and when the lights are on it looks amazing
