3D Printed Arc Reactor Prop

This page is about building a 3D printed Iron Man Arc Reactor prop, check out the main project index for the rest of the suit.

This Arc Reactor design has been specifically made so it can easy be printed on a home 3D printer, hence it is not movie accurate.

There are some YouTube videos about this, or scroll down for the version with pictures and words.

Since I’m building an entire Iron Man suit, I decided that I should really build another Arc Reactor prop. You can check out my first attempt made with items from the 99p store. his is intended to be like the Arc Reactor in the original Iron Man movie, since it won’t actually get installed in the suit.

Here are the initial cad models which were made in Autodesk 123D – which is free software. You can download the STL files from my download page.

The base has lots of spiky bits to support the parts at various levels which will make assembly easy, there are a few rings and things to add to the outside which will be separate parts. I’m hoping I can print all the parts with no support material.

All the parts will be printed in coloured material, the main ring and diffuser for the base will be printed in clear PLA. There will be separate ‘saddle’ parts, pictured on the far right below, which will fit onto the main ring and have wire wrapped around them:

Note that I had to reduce the number of ‘spikes’ on the base from 12 to 10 so that it matches the main clear ring and I can wrap the wire around the saddles/ring without the spikes being in random positions. I’ve also made two rings which fit onto the base, and the base diffuser is shown fitted on the right:

Here are the pictures of the parts and the whole thing assembled.