Iron Man has dominated movie and TV screens for the past decade, thanks to the firehose of content trained on us from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
But he’s a fiction — a creation of pixels, plastic and actor Robert Downey Jr. The real Iron Man doesn’t exist outside the imaginations of comic-book artists, digital wizards, costume designers and the fans who embrace his synthetic but glowing heart.
“Iron Man’s suit is designed to be rendered on a movie screen, not fabricated,” said Craig Brice, director of the advanced manufacturing program at Colorado School of Mines. “The (suit designs) are not something you make, but something you use to create CGI graphics for entertainment.”
That is, until Adam Savage, former co-host of the pop-engineering series “Mythbusters,” got a hold of them. Savage, who appeared on “Mythbusters” for 14 seasons from 2003 to 2016, is known for taking confusing and chaotic notions and exploding them — science-style — for the sake of edu-tainment.
Along with co-host and special effects technician Jamie Hyneman, Savage led Discovery Channel viewers through the halls of his brain (and his northern California warehouse/fabrication lab) as he used science to make physics, design and engineering accessible to a wide audience.
So when Savage asked the School of Mines if it would 3D print a real-life Iron Man suit out of titanium for the sake of Savage’s new Discovery Channel show, “Savage Builds,” the college rocketed to his aid.
A small request was added: It also had to fly — and repel bullets.
We caught up with Brice, who helped lead the heroic build at the Golden-based engineering school, about what they could (and couldn’t) do to create an actual Iron Man. The series, and the Iron Man segment, premieres at 8 p.m. June 14.
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