Kevin's 1984 Pack Build

[kevinj319]

Hello everyone!

This has been a long time coming. I started collecting parts for my very own pack build about 15 years ago. So much in my life has changed since then, but what has remained consistent is the box of pack parts taking up space and waiting to be assembled. Finally realizing that I don’t need to worry about obligations all of the time and that I need to get back into hobbies, I decided to get started on my pack earlier this year.

This will be a 1984-style pack created from an infamous Venky shell (obtained about 11 years ago). I’m leaning heavily into a hero pack, however I am more or less picking the details I like and not sticking strictly to a specific pack.

Here we go!

[kevinj319]

First, I went for the motherboard brackets. Riveting seems kind of… permanent, so it made me nervous and I wanted to get it over with. The motherboard even came pre-marked for where the holes go! Those of you who see it, don’t get ahead of me, I’ll get there.

Be sure to clean up the spicy tinsel before it gets everywhere.

There are a multitude of tutorials on this board for tapping the holes using the shell as a guide. It was easier than I thought. I used a tap in my drill that was most definitely intended to be used by hand, however I kept it lubricated, went slow, and continually backed out to clear the threads.

[kevinj319]

Ah yes, the brackets are all done and it was so painless! But wait…

Some of you may have already noticed in my last post. It seems that on this day, my brain decided to ignore decades of studying proton packs and instead drill holes where the pre-made marks were. Turns out, the marks were incorrect and the rivets are now positioned 90 degrees off from where they should be.

You’ve gotta be kidding me. Well, anything worth doing is worth doing twice. I drilled the rivets out and removed the brackets. I ordered new brackets and rivets from the gbfans shop. Then I patched the incorrect holes with JBWeld and sanded them smooth. It looks pretty good. Will it be noticeable after painting? I don’t know. It was at this point I decided that any small mistakes were going to add character and I wouldn’t get caught in the trap of thinking things had to be perfect. I think this was a good lesson to learn early on.

With the new brackets on, everything is now correct.

[kevinj319]

My shell also came with a bumper cast from a mold of a real one. The thing is, the bumper was over an inch wider than the shell at the mounting points. It could be squeezed, but I didn’t want that force applied constantly on the shell. I decided to use a heat gun to reshape the bumper.

I cut a piece of wood to a length that matched the proper width of my shell. I screwed the bumper to the piece of wood through the mounting holes by squeezing the ■■■■ out of the bumper. I then applied a heat gun as evenly as I could. I dipped the bumper in cold water to speed up the cooling process, then removed the wood. According to plan, the bumper did not expand back to it’s original width, and kept the width of the wood piece. This worked great!

I did not capture it in pictures, but I then had to use a similar process to un-skew the bumper along the other two axes as well. After my first adjustment, the bumper was the correct width but the center was no longer over the center of the cyclotron. The final adjustment was straightening a twist which would have caused the shock mount to appear angled down instead of pointing straight out.

It was all fairly easily straightened out with the heat gun and creative use of clamps to bend it to my will.

[kevinj319]

One of the well-known flaws of the Venky shell (see lineage information here) is that the valley is smaller than it should be. Because of this a standard beam line tube does not fit. I had a custom one made in a slightly smaller size, but due to the plate on the bottom it still did not fully fit. I needed to knock off a corner.

I also tapped holes for the booster tube. The plug will be held in by friction plus one of the booster’s bolts passing into it. The hole on the plug isn’t threaded.

I placed pieces of a wood dowel that will secure both ends of the vacuum hose.

[kevinj319]

I used a plastic construction shim to mount the injector tubes. The angle of the shim nearly exactly matches the draft on the powercell box, so it worked out great.

I was also able to attach a bracket. Instead of rivets, I opted to use similar-looking button heads.

Here is how it was looking with nearly all of the parts test-mounted.

[onedge]

Wow I can’t imagine collecting parts for over 15 years. That venky shell is indeed very notorious! This build is gonna be awesome, keep at it

[alphabeta001]

Fantastic.

Love seeing a pack build thread with excellent details

[sp-productions]

Loving it so far! Thanks for sharing your build!

Sean

[kevinj319]

Thanks for the comments, all. If anyone wants more detail, just let me know.

I made holes for the ribbon cable and the thrower loom. At least one pack seemed to have a bolt just below the hole to secure the cable. I liked that detail so I’m going to implement it.

At this point I started the process of removing the parts from the shell, but before I did so I attached the Ion Arm Cap. Drill bits wander on aluminum, so I have found that the pointy part of a spade drill bit makes a great punch for accurate hole placement.

[kevinj319]

I had a beautiful aluminum N-Filter from the gbfans shop. I think this thing is possessed because it somehow took over my body and compelled me to cut off the perfectly good molded-in N-Filter from my shell. I was endlessly nervous about this.

First I scored the line I wanted to cut with a sharp carpenter knife. I thought this would be best to prevent the gelgoat from chipping when I started hacking away.

When I got to this area, the gelcoat pushed into a hollow spot behind it where there was no fiberglass support, making a hole. This situation made me glad I decided to cut off the N-Filter as I would be getting rid of this weak point.

I used my Dremel Mulitpass --er-- Multimax, which turned out to be the absolute perfect tool for this removal. These are normally used to undercut doorjambs when installing new flooring and other such jobs.

I couldn’t help but feel a certain way once I made that first cut:

[kevinj319]

I couldn’t have done it without you, Multipass.

I of course had to grind/sand out enough material so that the hole was the size of the O.D. of the N-Filter and not the I.D. After that, here is how it looked dry-fit.

As you can imagine, I was happy with the results and of course I totally never doubted that this would work, I swear. I used some JB Weld SteelStik to hold it in place. The requisite “That ain’t going anywhere” was spoken so you know it’s good.

Finally, I used Milliput to fill in the cracks and make it look unified. For those of you who don’t know, Milliput has a longer cure time so you can work with it a little bit. Plus, if you get it slightly wet, it turns a bit gummy and you can push it into small cracks to make seams disappear. This picture is before sanding and cleanup.

[kevinj319]

Let’s talk about innerworkings.

Test-mounting the charging plate. You can also see I have attached the Alice frame using spacer blocks.

Here is where I decided to mount the sound board (which for the gbfans system, is also the main control board for everything else). There is a volume pot on the back that I wanted to be accessible, so I mounted it directly to the motherboard with standoffs.

As you can see, the volume pot will be accessible near the charging plate (removed in this picture). The hole on the middle right of the picture is where the charging cable will pass through the motherboard. I have a rubber grommet I will use to safely pass the cable through the hole.

I cut what looks like a huge hole for the speaker. I also have a speaker cover which I might use, but I may decide to 3D print a custom cover.

[kevinj319]

I wanted all electronics to be connected to the motherboard and not the shell. I purchased aluminum rods from Amazon and used them to elevate the powercell light board to the correct height. I tapped them for 10/32 bolts. I also got some circuit board blanks to use as a platform for the cyclotron lights, and as a sub-platform for the powercell lights.

Here is how the Powercell lights look when mounted.

I got some reflectors for the cyclotron lights. I was able to order some bolts that are intended for use in table lamps that are hollow to allow wires to pass through. These nearly perfectly fit the reflectors and will be used to bolt the reflectors to the board.

Here is the result with the cyclotron reflectors elevated off the motherboard. To avoid additional holes through the motherboard, the whole thing will be elevated with three posts which will utilize bolts that are already present for other purposes: One bolt for the speaker, and two bolts for the charging plate.

The battery will be attached to a board mounted as seen below. I cut notches in the board to facilitate velcro straps or zip ties to hold the battery.

[kevinj319]

Let’s talk about holes. I needed to grind/sand down the inside of the shell around the powercell window and cyclotron holes to create a flat surface for mounting the acrylic lenses. This is one area of my shell that was not done well in my opinion. The area around the powercell window was very uneven on the inside, with excess material only in some corners. The shell around the cyclotron ring areas was very thin and similarly uneven.

First the powercell window. It’s really hard to get a tool in that area. I used a dremel to grind on the area, but I wasn’t at all happy with the results. I also made mistakes and nicked the window itself a couple times.

I fixed this by filling the area behind the powercell window with milliput. Then I took my blue powercell acrylic lens and wrapped it in painter’s tape. I pressed the tape-covered acrylic into the milliput as evenly as possible. After the milliput hardened, I removed the acrylic and had a perfectly molded rectangle in exactly the correct size. I used a file and sandpaper to clean up the excess milliput around the window.

The cyclotron holes were an even bigger disaster. I had a lot of trouble getting the surface both even and also uniform among all four holes. As the shell was already thin, and I was a bit overzealous, I actually started to see areas of pink. This is not good because it means there is no fiberglass left and only the brittle gelcoat remains in those spots.

This picture shows how bad it got.

Not only did I need to support the structure, but I much preferred a thicc cyclotron with deep set lenses and didn’t like the thin look at all. I considered a few methods to fix this. I could fill it in with new fiberglass and redrill the holes, I could use epoxy somehow… finally I came up with a unique solution.

I 3D printed these cyclotron support rings. These will be epoxied behind the cyclotron rings. The epoxy will strengthen the thinned out areas, while the support rings will provide a perfectly flat surface to mount the acrylic lenses to. They are printed to the depth that I want for the holes.

This drawing is a cross section of a cyclotron hole, to attempt to show how this works. Please excuse the crudity of this drawing; it’s not to scale.

Here is what they look like from the inside once epoxied in place.

And here is how it looks from the outside after using milliput to hide the seam. Nice thicc cyclotron.

[kingpin]

Nice work on the Cyclotron holes, hopefully the improvisation will be nice and strong (and hopefully the bumper will provide extra protection to them once it’s in place).

I suppose an alternate option to get the lenses level that would’ve avoided the grinding route would’ve been to even out the internal surface inside the rings with body filler/JB weld, and smooth that to preference with sanding…

[quote=kevinj319 post_id=5006306 time=1757191786 user_id=29953]Please excuse the crudity of this drawing; it’s not to scale.
[/quote]

Hah!

[kevinj319]

@Kingpin post_id=5006310 time=1757206232 user_id=76

Nice work on the Cyclotron holes, hopefully the improvisation will be nice and strong (and hopefully the bumper will provide extra protection to them once it’s in place).

Oh yeah, it’s solid. You could lift the pack with the cyclotron holes like a bowling ball.*

I suppose an alternate option to get the lenses level that would’ve avoided the grinding route would’ve been to even out the internal surface inside the rings with body filler/JB weld, and smooth that to preference with sanding…

Absolutely. I approached it assuming removing material would be more straightforward. It wasn’t until I saw the results, both in the aesthetics and the structure, that I realized I should have added material to start with.

*Do not try at home

[kevinj319]

I wasn’t satisfied with the way my booster tube fit to the EDA. The angle wasn’t cut just right, and I think I tapped for the mounting bolts at an angle, because the tube tended to twist out of alignment slightly when the bolts were tightened.

I bought a new ABS pipe and cut it properly. I used cardstock to trace the EDA angle, then used the laser guide on my miter saw to match that angle. I taped the booster tube in place on the shell and tapped for the mounting bolts, this time being extra careful to go in at 90 degrees.

Here is the finished product (with the ion arm mounted to ensure proper alignment).

And with that, I think I’m done tinkering and the next phase will be to start painting. The weather is absolutely unfriendly to spray paint right now, so I will move on to that when I can. In the meantime, I got out all my thrower parts to take inventory and refamiliarize myself with assembly. One of the first things I noticed is some of the parts came with bolts and some did not, so I will need to grab those before I start a test assembly.

[kevinj319]

It’s been a while since I posted, but I have been doing some more work on my pack.

I masked the motherboard and gave it some paint.

I put all the electronics on the motherboard for the first time, and did a power-up test. The lights and sound worked great! I was a bit concerned because these parts sat in storage forever and I never bothered to test them when I first received them.

Once I started testing the electronics, I realized that I would need to make changes to the charging plate. I purchased it pre-wired, however the switch simply toggled the charging port on and off. I wanted it to also cut power to the sound board so that the system could be truly powered off. I replaced the switch with a DPDT and wired it up to toggle between “pack on” and “pack off/charging”. I learned to solder in order to do this, which I always wanted to do anyway. Once the charging plate modification was made, I put everything back on the motherboard and routed the internal cables.

I also added a 3D printed speaker cover. I painted it olive drab and then dirtied it up with watered down black, brown, and red acrylic. I roughed up the danger label with steel wool (VERY light pressure) and watered down black paint.

Here’s an isolated picture of the speaker cover before I weathered it. No one will ever see this on the pack, but I did it anyway.

Painting the shell and associated parts will be the next step. I’m hoping to get that done between Christmas and the New Year, so there will be some exciting progress coming up.

[stewartwb]

This is an amazing build!

I love everything about it.

Keep up the excellent work!

I cannot wait to see your progress.