new member, first pack, rush to build in 5 days

Equipment Proton Packs
1

Hey all. I thought I would share the progress I’ve made so far on my first ever proton pack. I know it’ll be pretty ■■-hum for veterans, but for me this has seemed like a pretty intense ordeal.

I committed a few months ago to be a ghostbuster for Halloween along with my two sons. At first I was thinking I just needed a khaki flightsuit with a shoulder patch and a name tag. But I realized quickly that any decent costume must have elbow pads, pistol belt, gloves, etc, and of course… a proton pack.

I gathered most of my costume in August and September and felt pretty prepared. I was thinking and planning the whole time for my pack, but honestly hadn’t done much toward it.

I only finally really dived in this past weekend. I ordered lights Friday (which arrived Monday) and started sketching out my motherboard late on Saturday. I worked all day Sunday and have tried to chip away in the evenings since then. I’m trying desperately to finish by this coming Friday (the 28th) for a party that evening.

At this point I may have to take a day off work in order to finish.

Here are some pics of my progress. I would appreciate any tips anyone may have for busting this out and making it look good. I’ll also gladly answer any questions anyone has. I doubt I have much to offer as far as technique.

One interesting substitution I’ve made that I haven’t seen come up before is using 1/4" drip tubing for the various hoses. I couldn’t think how to come up with the colored hoses at such short notice, so I bought a 50’ roll of the tiny drip tubing for like $3, cut the right lengths out, hung them from the ceiling, and painted them red, blue, green and yellow with craft paint. I then bought a bunch of plastic couplers for the drip line (straight & elbow) and painted them with craft paint to look brass. That will be the extent of my tubes and connectors for this pack.

I had initially started with the intention of building everything out of 1/4" plywood like my motherboard, thrower body, and synchronous generator. But that was just taking way too long, so I decided to switch to foam with plywood reinforcement where needed (as you can see, I made my power cell completely from foam).

2

Heh, You’re doing something in 5 days that we did for five years… Good luck, and keep up with the pictures..

3

Five days…you can do it!. Making the body and gun of the pack can be done in five days. The finer details will be tougher. You can find the loom and some stuff at Wal-Mart and Home Depot. Wires, switches and knobs can be found in the parts bins at Radio Shack.

FYI, my scratch-build took close to two months. And I collected all the parts for months on end before that.

4

Depending on how much you care about accuracy, a passable pack can be built in a few days. Passable meaning will impress most average people. The hard part is getting the pack up to meet YOUR OWN expectations. That takes longer, if it can ever be truly done.

5

It’s actually looking good for just a few “hours” I’m presuming?

Best of luck with it!

6

Making progress. I think I can make it.

I pulled an all-nighter last night and have been at it almost all day today. I have pretty much everything built, including my lights setup and lenses (I was pleased with how that turned out). Now it’s just bondo, sanding, attaching, painting, and sticking on all the cables, hoses and various doodads. It seems like the home stretch now, but on the other hand that still seems like a lot to accomplish before tomorrow night.

I’ll post more pics up later.

Thanks for the encouragement.

7

Well I spent far more time on this than I had anticipated, including one 36 hour straight marathon.

But I got it to what I considered passable and something I was proud to wear in public. I still had clamps on it and glue and paint drying up until minutes before I walked out the door Friday night for my first Halloween party. I obviously left out a few details and fudged a few things (including putting very little effort into the thrower), but I was proud of my work. Let me know what you guys think.

Here are the rest of the photos I promised:

Dry fitting a couple foam parts:

The hoses I used (painted 1/4" drip sprinkler lines):

My bumper half-way cut out:

Wired up for lights. The tubes are just sheet metal cut and taped with Gorilla Tape and stuffed on the end with foam. The lenses are irregular pieces of a broken CD case painted red.

The lights work!

Starting to really come together

In the middle of the night, having gone for almost two days straight, getting close to the wire… and my bumper snaps while trying to screw it into place. That was upsetting.

Glue drying on all the ribbing

Finally painted! Paint is on at 1:30 AM Thurs night. Supposed to be at a party 8 pm Friday. Paint says 24 hours to fully dry. Oh well, it should still work out, right?

Once I got it painted I went to bed for the first time since Tuesday night. Got up in the morning and went right back at it.

Here is what I planned to use for my ribbon cable. It’s three spools of flat bracelet stuff I bought at the craft store. Two of them are striped with three colors.

Stuck them in a more or less random pattern on a piece of packing tape and here was the result. Could be worse, right?

And finally… here is she ready for her big public debut, minutes before heading out the door:

So how’d I do on my first pack? Any tips for making it quicker, easier or better next time around?

8

A really cool first pack. Good work.

9

Here are a few final photos taken in better light and hopefully a little clearer:

10

Good enough for a 5-day build! I love scratch builds. Everyone is very creative about tackling some of the more tricky parts of packs.

11

That turned out really well.

very inventive use of materials

12

You built that in five days? Goddamn.

13

Very impressive. :slight_smile:

14

Pilby, this is very good stuff. After Halloween do you plan on finishing it? I noticed the gun isnt finished. I wish I had those talents for 5 days worth of work

15

Nice job.

16

Great work so far!

For what it’s worth I always use clear tubing from home depot, but if you hold it up to the nozzle you can get the paint to spray into the tube and run down. Coloring it from the inside like that gives it a nice gloss but also prevents the paint from flaking or chipping off.

17

Thanks for the comments everyone.

@thunderstruck - Interesting idea on the tubing. I might have to see how well that works. For this build I brushed on craft paint that I already had lying around. I would have had to buy four cans of spray paint in order to paint them that way. Not sure how easy it would be to get craft paint to run down the inside of clear tubing.

@ghostengineer - I’m definitely taking a bit of a break, but I’ll probably go back at it eventually and add some of the details I left off, like pretty much everything on the thrower, plus the Clippard on the main pack, the booster frame, the plating around the bottom of the synchronous generator, resistors on the ion arm, etc.

Just within the last hour or so I can’t get quite a few of my photos to load in the thread anymore. They were linked from a public dropbox folder. The pics there haven’t moved or changed as far as I know.

Are they not showing up for everyone else as well? What could the problem be?

18

I am very impressed. Hope your Halloween went well.

My first pack took me over a week and a half, and didn’t look anywhere near as good as yours. Excellent work!