First Proton Pack (no Kit, all from scratch)

[snooker]

Hello community,

First of all:

• please excuse my bad english

• it’s my first Proton Pack i’m building, so please be gentle when it comes to details :mrgreen:

• initially it was just a Halloween project, but now i’m hooked with the GB Lifestyle (reading the Forum and the whole page makes you kind of addicted ;-))

• the following pictures were taken during the last few months

The Idea:

it all started when i was young and saw the movies… “I wanna have one of those packs and hunt some ghosts!” Over 20 Years later when the Coivd pandemic startet, i decide to realise my Childhood dream and make something cool for Halloween. (Halloween gets more and more popular in Switzerland)

I asked 2 friends of mine if they would join me going “on patrol” this Halloween in Zürich to entertain the people And yes they do! So i knew i have to make 3 Packs for the guys. And two Traps (one as a hero prop and one that is smoking). And a PKE meter. And the Uniforms and and and…

It was end of march as i startet ordering the electronic parts and all the other stuff and i thought i’ll have plenty of time and now it’s allready October :shock:

that been said, lets jump into it :lol:

Making the Forms

So i had to make 3 packs. And i didn’t want to build every part 3 times from beginning. So i decided to make every part of plywood and vacuform the parts needed with polystyrene. So i 'm able to safe some time.

Lets start with the Synch Generator/ Spacer:

Get some wood on the Lathe to make the disks for the upper part:

after some glueing and sanding, i got the synch generator finished.

NOTE: i don’t have any other pics making the other Forms! but you can imagine that building the other Parts aren’t any different

Building the Vacuformer

To get the 2mm Polystyrene sheets into form, i need a vacuumtable, a source of heat and a frame to clamp the styrene sheets into it. I got some steele angled profiles from the local hardware store to build the frame. The upper and the lower part are held together with hinges at the back. To clamp the sheets securely into place the frame is held closed with two screws in the front. (not shown here)

The table is build with an 1inch sheet of plywood. I had to drill 144 holes into the wood to make sure the vacuum will suck the styrene firmly to the forms.

Here teh lower side is shown. The small blocks in the middel will prevent the top plate to bend inwards during the forming process. I don’t have a picture from the lower plywood sheet. It only has hole in it to attach the vacuum cleaner :mrgreen:

the Heater

To even heat the styrene, i had to build an ‘oven’ where i can place the frame on top of it. So i got some 8mm plywood, made a box (around 2feet high), isolated it with tinfoil (to prevent the wood from catching fire) and placed two 1200w bathroom heater underneath it:

Now lets give it a try! I clamped a sheet of styrene into the frame, placed it over the heater, waited a few minutes until the sheets were hanging through, turned the vac on, pressed the frame over the form on the vacuumtable aaaaand:

I was impressed how detailed the result was :shock: Clean and crisp lines were formed. the same thing with the cyclotron:

The most tricky part was to get the forms out of the mold It can happen that the styrene molds can break while getting them off. But theres nothing what glue can’t fix wink

So after that sucessfull test i continued to make the other parts, like the Booster / EDA. Here you can see that the corners won’t sit flush to the form. So those must bee removed with a rotary tool later on

After a few evenings in the shop i had most of the parts together:

i reinforced the bigger parts with epoxy and fibreglss mats to stiffen it.

meanwhile the 3D printer was doing its things so i could start to glue the parts together:

gave it a coat of primer:

and got the can of paint out wink

I think it is not that bad :lol: (yes there is a neutrino wand in the picture, but more about that later on )

Note: This was just the first Pack, i didn’t start with the other two packs because i wanted to get some ‘experience’ during the buildingprocess. So i know what i can do better when assembling the other two packs :!:

Thats it for now, more to come

cheers

Mike

[gerard55]

Looking really good.

[snooker]

Good morning community,

Let’s continue with the thrower. As mentioned before, i don’t have a lot of pictures of the building process. But i think you get the idea

The housing is also vacuum formed, just like the other pieces of the pack. i noticed to late that the left side of the thrower (where de handle is attached) is completely rounded. i think i read the plans wrong :-? Anyway, the next mold will be modified. After attaching the handles, i made the Trigger housing of 2mm styrene.

I bought myself a lathe back in February, so i started to make the knobs for the thrower. They’re made from Aluminium.

All the other fancy parts like the Clipard valve, heatsink, gun track, grips etc. are made with the 3D Printer.

I machined the rear cylinder by myself. And yes i know that the hose plugs are to big, but at this point i was not able to finde the smaller ones. They will be replaced someday, but for now they’ll do the job.

The transparent acrylic tube was a little to small in diameter to sit flush inside of the PVC pipe, so i machined a metal ring to fit it right:

The Arduino Nano Board which controlls the whole electronics is placed inside the thrower. Its a very tight fit, because the bargraph has a lot of wires. I think i will place them inside the Proton pack when building the other two packs.

after giving them a first coat of color, i think it turned out not that bad. i’ll have to do some cosmetic work and there are still some details missing like the Gun tip etc.

It’s comming together :mrgreen:

That’s it for now, next time we’ll take a look at the electronics and detail-work

cheers

Mike

[snooker]

Hello Community,

please excuse the delay on Updates, i was pretty busy the last 2 weeks before Halloween to get 3 Packs and a Trap done in Time :roll:

So here are a few Updates:

the two other packs are comming along

So finished all tipps for the wands on the lathe including the push-trigger (made on the mill) on the plexiglass tube. i also wired the fire button and the LED on the ear. the banjos and the Hat-Lights are made in the 3d printer. (and yes i know the hat light is to small )

Electronics:

to light and sound the packs i used the Arduino-Build by CountDeMonet (found on Github). In the following picture you can see how the wireing is done.

The packs are powered by a 12v lead battery (1) with a capacity of 4.5 Ampere. (in this pack its 2x 6v with 3.6 Amp ) First i wanted to power the packs with LiPo batteries, but they are pretty expensive if you want them in a certain size. And the lead batteries are less sensitive when it comes to deep discharge.

Then the 12v are steped down to 5.3V with a Step-Down-Converter (2) to power the Adafruit Soundboard (3) and the Arduino nano Board (located inside the wand) The 20W class D Amplifier (4) is powered with 12V to get the full power out of it 8) the 2 Speakers are JVC 300w that i got for 25$ :lol:

The powerswitch is located in the motherboard (6) and i added a little voltage-meter (5) underneath the Gun mount to keep track of the battery-life.

You’ll find a demo here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT8cHX_pC5Q&

The Alice frames used here are the replicas made by Rothco and not the original frames. The Motherboard is attached with 4 M8 Screws and selfmade spacers:

And Done :twisted: (yes, the motherboard is still not painted, pictures made earlier)

it took me over 4 Months to build all packs, do the elecronic stuff and order all the parts and other stuff. I did mistakes and i learned a lot during the building process. i would do a few things the other way in the next build

Until next time!

Cheers

Mike

[DarkSpectre]

Dude, there is so much win in this post. Excellent job, my friend. I love the look of Vaccuform. Mine is a Studio Creations vac shell. I’ve always wanted to attempt my own vaccuform.

[snooker]

Thank you DarkSpectre, much appriciated

Vacuforming is not that hard, there are a lot of good tutorials on YouTube with good inputs, tipps and tricks. For my next build i think i will try to make a silicone mold and do the whole shell in one piece with fibreglass and epoxy.

[Couture]

Looks great, I love to see scratch builds like these. The vacuum formed parts remind me of the old styrene shells that javamonkey sold back in the day which I used for my first pack build in 2004 or so.

[snooker]

Thanky you Couture 2004 is way back, do you still have the pack?

[Couture]

No, I sold it on ebay shortly after I built it. It wasn’t a great build, especially by today’s standards. Certainly not as good as yours. I still wonder if it’s out there somewhere though!

[snooker]

Hello Community,

for Halloween 2021 i decided to update all Packs with a e-Cig to give them the final touch.

So first i ordered a bunch of Kanger K2 Clearomizer Vape Heads and made a first prototype as seen on many Youtube Tutorial videos. The result turned out like this:

My goal was, not to open the Pack every time i want to refil the tank so i decided to mount the Vape-Head on the outside of the motherboard. For this i got myself some fittings to disconnect the tank and refill it. The Pump is mounted on the inside, the tubing goes through the MoBo, to the tank, then through the fitting back into the pack and from there to the N-Filter:

Tank on the outside between the MoBo and the ALICE Frame:

From the fitting to the N-Filter:

inside the N-Filter i mounted a 40mm fan

Venting:

To give the final touches to the packs i thought the packs looked to sterile, so i decided to give them a weathering:

Before and After

After that, the packs were ready for Halloween

cheers

Mike

[oidoglr]

That outside mounting of the tank is brilliant.