Arc Reactor

Iron Man Arc Reactor

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

This Iron Man Arc Reactor prop was made from items purchased in the local 99p store. You can see the items I used as well as the process below.

Here is a YouTube video 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 an Arc Reactor prop. This is intended to be like the Arc Reactor in the original Iron Man movie, since it won’t actually get installed in the suit. Pretty much all of the items I used came from the 99p store, with the exception of some wire and a few electronic components.

The items I bought are; an LED light with batteries, sink strainers, some pins in a circular holder, a solar garden light;

…some aluminium mesh, and a solar decking light.

I cut the middle out of the pin holder – this piece fits quite nicely onto the smaller sink strainer. I also painted it black and mounted some of the aluminium mesh behind it:

Next, I took some plastic cups and some dual inline sockets for mounting chips on circuit boards. The rims were cut off three of the cups and the chip holders were glued on:

wrapped some copper wire around each chip holder and soldered links between each section:

The strainer/pin holder assembly was glued in the middle of this, and the plastic dome from the garden light was glued on the back. I stuck the back of the decking light inside the dome with the LEDs from the blue light onto this. I’ve left the battery box and switch from the blue light outside on the end of a piece of wire: