Iron Man Arc Reactor

Along with creating a replica of one of Iron Man's helmets from the films, I have also constructed my version of the Arc Reactor worn by Tony Stark / Iron Man. Made up of mostly of $20 worth of random hardware from Lowe's I have constructed a pretty cool version. It all started with the Sylvania brand DOT-it nightlight, copper beading wire, a 2" diameter plastic plug (the kind that is meant to go inside the hole in the middle of an outdoor patio table....to plug up where the umbrella goes), a universal bell style faucet aerator, (1) 2" diameter steel conduit locknut, galvanized steel hanger tape & lots of hot glue

I began by taking apart the nightlight. It took some time but i finally popped the case apart and threw away everything except the bottom battery case and the small LED lights mounted on a small circuit board.

Next, I cut a 9 1/4" strip of the galvanized hanger tape and constructed a brand new outer shell to house the lights and battery. This new shell allowed the other parts I was using to be much easier to mount. The second part of this build was the main decorative part of the "arc reactor". I took the solid plastic patio table plug and along with my handy Dremel tool I hollowed out the center, sanded the edges smooth and then marked (10) spots equally spaced from one another to give me an idea of where to wrap the decorative copper wire.

For the bottom "knots" of the copper wire, i secured them down with a little bit of E-6000 glue. This stuff is very strong. Better than super glue. Finally, I hot glued the copper-wrapped ring to the top of the battery casing, cut the sink aerator down to size, ground off all of the writing on the bottom, reassembled the inner pieces backwards (on purpose)and sanded it smooth with my Dremel and placed the sink aerator into the center of the table ring. I also attached a small strip of the galvanized hanger tape to attach to the magnet on the back of the battery case so that the batteries wouldn't fall out. Since i destroyed the original nightlight casing. This also called for a test of how bright the lights were now.

Made a few adjustments and voila....my version of the arc reactor. I'm going to add some small detail to it still but it's about 90% completed. Here's a few shots of the "almost finished" result before and after attaching the locknut coupler.