He explained that he learned a lot during his first build, and that these 3D printed superhero projects have been the “best therapy” for him when he couldn’t sit still. But the suits aren’t just for cosplay competitions, costume parties, or hanging out at home.
He said that he started the War Machine Mark III suit back in December, and just finished last week. O’Sullivan needed a build volume that was a little taller than the Robo3D R1+ offered, so he purchased a Rostock Max V3 desktop 3D printer kit from SeeMeCNC and put together the printer first. He got the model for the suit from Do3D.com again, but also used Autodesk Fusion 360 and SolidWorks to make some additional features.O’Sullivan told 3DPrint.com, “The original plan was to wear my first suit (red one) to visit childrens hospitals, but unfortunately the first build just wasnt strong enough for continuous wear. I needed to find a way to improve on the process.”
As he mentioned, O’Sullivan learned quite a lot from his first build – this time, he made some custom modifications to the shoes of the suit, which brought his height of 5’8″ up to nearly 6’2″, and while he’s used PLA in the past, he learned after wearing his Iron Man suit a few times that it wasn’t strong enough for his purposes, and used PETG for the entire War Machine Mark III suit. He also worked to make the interior of the suit stronger by adding fiberglass to each part once it was printed. As the War Machine Mark III has a lot of parts, you can imagine the vast amount of work this took.
O’Sullivan told us, “I would basically divide the suit into sections and work on them one at a time.”
O’Sullivan used 3D software like Meshmixer and Autodesk Netfabb to separate the various shells of the parts and slice them, as many of the pieces for the suit were larger than the Rostock Max V3’s print volume. Then he would assemble the 3D printed parts, using a soldering gun to weld them all together.
If you thought O’Sullivan’s 3D printed Iron Man suit was cool, then you’ll really be impressed by the War Machine Mark III. It features operating servos, which make the shoulder guns rise and fire, has several of the sound effects from the movie, and is voice-activated using the open source electronics platform Arduino. It even plays music!“I picked up most of the various post finishing techniques such as the painting and the custom electronics by scouring through numerous video tutorials via the Stan Winston School of Character Arts and reading through a web forum for prop making known as the Replica Prop Forum,” O’Sullivan told us.
Last week, O’Sullivan made his first of many visits in his 3D printed War Machine Mark III suit to a children’s hospital. He’s from my neck of the woods in Ohio, and visited the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, which he called a “heartwarming experience.” Share your thoughts in the War Machine forum at 3DPB.com.