Hey guys, I'm Nate welcome back to the workshop Iron man is one of my favorite movies and today
We're going to be taking a look at how to build our very own Iron Man arc reactor nightlight
Let's go over the materials that we have and get started building
I do have quite a few items on the workbench at the moment but most of them are low cost and easy to get your
Hands on I have a can of some seaside colored spray paint
I've got some black and some gold acrylic paint a simple paintbrush this cutting board
I think was 88 cents at Walmart and about the same cost for this small strainer
These little touch lights come in a pack of two for eight or nine dollars at Walmart
Sitting underneath our touch light is a piece of foam core board these of course usually come in much larger sheets
I've just cut a small piece off because that's all we're gonna need for this build
I have a strip of staple guns staples a
Standard keyring three small hex head screws some copper wire
This other matte underneath the rest of this stuff is also supposed to be a form of cutting board it's sold in a three pack
For about a dollar and it's just a thin flexible plastic
I have a circle compass an exacto knife a glue gun
And I have this tool which is designed for punching holes and setting Hardware in leather really
I'm just going to be using the one tool that punches out a small hole
It's a little bit smaller than a standard
Hole punch if you don't have one of these you can easily use a drill bit or a small hot nail for the holes that
We need to punch. It's just going to be used on our thin orange plastic the first pieces
We need to make are some circles cut out of our thick cutting board
And they need to be the same diameter as our touch light we want to cut out two circles
One will just be a disc
That's the exact same size and shape as the surface of our touch light the second piece will be a ring that almost perfectly matches
This white border going around our light for the solid disc we can easily just trace out the light
And it will give us a disc just the right size
But because we want to add a border on the other one let's try using a compass just the right size
To measure out the first circle and then keeping our Center in the right spot
We can measure out a smaller circle within it now the diameter of this light appears to be just barely under three inches
So if we set our compass to be just under an inch and a half we should get a circle
that's the same size as the diam or light the specific measurement of our ring should be just exactly the width of the
Inside of our staples because our staples are later going to fit over this ring
It's kind of funny
How this ring looks larger than this one because it's measured on the outside and this one is drawn at the exact interior diameter
But really these two should come out being the exact same size cutting boards are designed to be tough
And they're designed to hold up to things like knives and blades
So this board can be a little bit tricky to get through however
there are a lot of tools that can cut it really easily if you have a hole saw the right size that would do a
Great job. However in the interest of saving time for the video
I got my hands on a scroll saw and I'm gonna use that to cut these pieces out
There's our first disc I want to cut out the inside first and of course
I can't just pass the blade through but these blades are designed to come off and on really easily so what I'll do is drill
A hole into the plastic take the blade off fit it through the hole, and then reattach it on the scroll saw
There we go our ring is now cut out
Let's clean this up with a little bit of sandpaper, and then we'll be ready to move on
Now the reason I chose to use this cutting board material is that it's strong rigid and it's excellent at defusing light
So what we're going to do is have the disc and the ring both sit above our touch light
And they should give a nice
Muted glow without being too intense the arc reactor in the movie has a slight blue tint coming off of it
So let's take our solid disc and paint one side of it with that aqua blue spray paint we have
We can now see that we get a nice soft slightly blue glow
Just what we're looking for we now want to take our ring and modify it so that it has ten points
Going around the circle of what seemed to be
Magnetic coils of some kind to do that we're going to be using our staples and our copper wire each of the two points
We'll use two staples
So it's break twenty staples off of this stick that we have
We'll want to place our staples over our ring
Flip it over and then crimp them down, so they're holding on tightly to the ring
We should have less than one centimeter of a gap in between the two staples
Once the staples are really well pressed down. They should hold themselves in place pretty well
You could maybe move them if you tried hard, but overall they're gonna stay where you put them
Now let's put another set of staples directly across from the first set
With our first two sets of staples installed we now need to evenly spaced out four more sets around on each side of them
Hopefully the staples are holding on nice and tight to your plastic ring
But if some of them are a little bit loose you can easily just use a dot of hot glue to hold them in place
Now that we have all of our staples attached to our plastic ring you need to wrap some of our copper wire
around the plastic in between the sets of staples
Let's cut off about a two-inch section that we'll use to wrap around
That way we won't have to pass all of our wire through our ring as we do the wrapping
So now on the back of our ring. Let's put a small dab of glue in between two of the staples
We've then press our copper wire down into that glue
If you're using really hot glue make sure you don't do that with bare fingers. It'll hurt
Wrap that around once cross it around the back and then wrap it down a second time
And we now have a nice
coil of wrapped copper wire in between our two staples
So on the back again, let's trim off the excess, so it doesn't wrap around further
And then we'll glue down the ends of our copper wire and look at that we have our little
Electromagnet driving our arc reactor or whatever that thing is like I said, it's not very clear the exact function
So now we just need to do that nine more times
there we have it all ten of our sections are now wrapped with our copper wire and our ring is looking pretty good on the
Inside of the arc reactor there are a few
Concentric rings building up from a spot in the middle that has sort of a mesh grid over it
We'll be using the metal mesh from this sieve as the grid on the bottom of the arc reactor
And we'll be cutting some concentric rings out of this plastic for the Rings that build up inside the arc reactor
To begin let's cut off the mesh from the sieve and flatten it out as best we can so that we can measure a flat
circle rather than a domed one
We're doing now fortunately this stuff is quite flexible
To measure out the size that we want that circle to be we're going to make it match the
Keyring that we'll be using this will actually end up getting attached to the arc reactor a little bit higher up
But it's a perfect measure for the size that we want this circle beat
We now need to cut out five concentric rings the smallest of which should fit nicely
right over our silver mesh the largest of which
Should just barely be smaller than the interior diameter of our plastic ring
We're going to want the smallest ring to slightly overlap the edge of our mesh
So if we make our first circle just slightly smaller than that we should be able to make the outside of it
Just lightly larger, and then it will completely cover the edge
So that right there will be the size of our first ring and now we need to have four more of the same thickness
Extending from it
There we go our fifth ring and we can see that it just barely fits inside
The plastic ring with the copper wound around it we need to use our exacto knife and very carefully cut out
Around each of those circles we just drew
So now we've got our five circles of ascending size
And we need to change them to the right color the pieces in the movie look like they're probably made out of brass
So let's use a nice golden brass colored paint and change these to look like they're made of metal
I'll first add a black base coat onto the plastic as I think that will make the gold show up a little bit nicer
Our five plastic circles are now painted and looked nice and brass colored now
We need to find a way to attach them at an ascending angle onto our arc reactor our smallest ring needs to be attached to
Our mesh circle and that will get glued down on the center of our plastic disc
We're going to want to suspend our ring a little bit above the disk down below
So let's cut out three pieces of our foam core board that will act as struts holding the ring up above the disk
Our big plastic ring will sit supported up above these pieces
But we want our smaller brass colored concentric rings to sit nested down inside
Going from the bottom up to the hype of the top ring
So now we want to cut from that point down to where our foam core board
touches our smallest inner brass ring
And of course we want to cut all three pieces to match that
I
Have here an equilateral triangle
That I cut out using a compass and a ruler and I'm just going to use that to mark
What points to put these supports on so that they're evenly spaced around our circle?
Now let's quickly hit the sides and sloped parts of these supports with some black paint
Now that we have our supports painted what we're going to do is glue our rings so that they're touching the supports and
stacked nicely on top of one another
The angle that we've cut the supports out should keep them perfectly spaced as it ascends from one sized ring to the next
Next piece we need to make is a slightly thicker ring that will go above all of these
This will have holes going through it all the way around and it's what our
Hexagonal headed screws will fit into that its widest
It should have the same diameter as our top ring
But it will be much thicker so its inner diameter will be considerably smaller than our top ring
We now need to use our poll punch and punch holes going all the way around this ring
To make sure that I have three that are evenly spaced out
I'm going to use my little equilateral triangle again and just put three marks of where I want those holes to go
Also be helpful to me to have an inner
Line that will show where the edge of the hole should go, so I don't end up having
One hole right here, and one hole right here
So I keep it in one nice smooth straight line
Now I have three evenly spaced holes, and I need to fill in all of the gaps between them
With our holes punched we can now take our hex head screws and thread them down through the hole into the plastic
And now get a good sense of how this is going to work
But the only pieces we still need to cut out are some support struts that go from our three hex head screws
Into the middle to hold up our silver ring
We'll cut those pieces out of some more of this semi rigid plastic we can see that
We aren't going to need those pieces to be very long
They only have to reach from the hex head screw to the edge of our keyring
Let's add holes into the end of each of these three tabs
And then we'll bend them to give a little bit of a different shape
To hold up our ring slightly lower than the plastic ring with the holes in it
Now I'm going to use the back edge of this razor blade to add a couple of bends into our plastic
So now we need to attach each of these three tabs on to their respective screws
It fits nicely over the screw, and let's just add a little bit of hot glue to keep it firmly in place
With our three supports in their spots
We can drop in our little ring and now we can mark where we need to cut off the extra plastic
Now let's add a little bit of glue on all those edges and a fix our ring permanently
We do have a little bit of overlap so let's take our exacto knife and just try and trim a little bit of that off
Here's our center ring now. Let's use a little bit more of our paint and paint everything that's orange to be black
At this point it's time to start the final assembly on the piece so first
Let's glue the outer ring onto the support structure around it
Now the way that these are spaced out our little hex screws will rest nicely right on top of the highest
Golden ring, so we just need to add a little dab of glue to the bottom of each screw
And then a fix it onto those rings
Let's cut three small support pieces out of our foam core board
Glue them on and then paint everything black before gluing this on to the supports
Then we'll attach the smaller black and silver rings into the center
In a darkroom this lights up
Beautifully, this of course is more of the display piece arc reactor than something you would want to wear as a costume
It's fairly wide overall
But you would be able to follow these exact same principles and just make everything
Shorter if you were trying to make a version that you could maybe mount to your chest as part of a costume
Tony Stark built one of these in a cave
Now you can build your own with just a quick trip to Walmart and a couple of tools
Thanks for joining us for this video and remember to come gear yourself up with hats shirts and other cool merch at the king of
Random.com see you there
Interesting drawing black on top of the silver mesh. It doesn't really look it's black
It just looks like it's invisible almost that almost perfectly matches this edge on the scope there it goes
"whack"