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This Guy Made His Very Own Iron Man Armor With a 3D Printer

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Sorry, Tony Stark: It turns out that making a cool, high-tech Iron Man suit is no longer the sole province of genius playboys.

Ross Wilkes, a 20-year-old Marvel fan living in Birmingham, England, recently completed his very own model of the famed red-and-gold armor, which he made with his own 3D printer.

Wilkes, who works in flower wholesaling, began working on the suit after seeing Iron Man 3 and watching Stark’s Mark XVLII suit split apart during a crucial scene in the film. He’d just recently purchased a Velleman K8200 Printer for about £800 (about $1,250 in US dollars), and made it his New Year’s resolution for 2014 to make his own piece of film history.

"I have no idea what I wanna do with it," Wilkes told Yahoo Movies."I just wanted to build the Iron Man suit for so long, so I’m glad I managed to complete it."

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The project took him a full 14 months of almost nonstop work, including many 11-hour days of designing, printing, and assembling. Wilkes spent about £400 ($615) on nearly 1,100 feet of plastic. In total, he printed 597 different pieces, which he put together using a solder and a heat gun. ”It’s actually the first thing I’ve ever printed properly on the machine,” Wilkes explained, “after [having] a lot of problems and disasters before.”

He didn’t paint the armor, either, relying only on the natural color of the plastic that he bought and shaped with his printer, which produced the pieces in 20 x 20 x 20 cm pieces.

Standing at six foot two inches and weighing in at around 55 pounds, about 90 percent of the armor could be worn functionally, Wilkes said, with hands, and knee joints needing adjustment. He’s hard at work trying to fix those small elements so that he can slip into the gear, but he’s already got his eyes on building Captain America’s armor next.

Which means that Wilkes is, quite literally, assembling the Avengers.

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