Greetings, from the engineer...

General Discussion Introductions
1

So introductions…

I actually am an engineer and I work on small renewable energy products that get sold in developing/“frontier” markets. While in University, I (among others) made some really big fiberglass/CF parts… Here’s an example of one of our fairings for a competition vehicle (human powered):

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It’s been a few years since I’ve made fiberglass tools, but I’ve been wanting to get into prop building and Ghostbusters is quite awesome and has an incredible amount of documentation. Seems like a logical starting place.

For now, the goal is Halloween costume. I’ve gotten a very, very late start - so I’m going to do a combination of rapid prototype parts and foam core construction. Here’s the gun mount (based on Stefan’s plans), 3D printed:

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It needs some filler, that’s for sure. The actual gun mount holes will accept a threaded insert so I can actually screw the metal part in. It weighs about 200 grams - mostly because I went big on wall thickness (it could probably be 100-150g). Eventually, I want the 3D printed parts to become my master mold and I’ll have the bigger parts laser cut and/or routed out of tooling foam.

So that’s that.

2

Welcome.

I don’t think rapid prototyping is the way to go with any of the Pack parts (with the exception of the Proton Gun).

You would be much better off CNC milling a master out of foam or from stacked sheets of MDF.

3

Thanks!

Any particular reason RP is sub-optimal? Texture is the biggest thing I can think of for the process I’m using - anything else?

4

Well. Just going off of that gun block that you have had made…

The whole pack is huge, and the costs involved with making a whole shell on a rapid prototyper would be high (even if you are just paying material costs). And as you said, the texture really isn’t great.

I think a pack made out of a high density foam on a CNC router would be great. I’ve got one that would fit the pack, but would need to be done in layers given the height. It would only cost a little amount of money, would be much faster, and the end result would be much neater.