Hi everyone! within the last month, one of the shells from the line of HMS shells that have been floating around the community for the past year came into my hands. Originally I was building up a heavily modified Bigi330 shell to have as my “cherry” pack for display at home; it was going to be the proton pack on the cover of the OMNI Magazine during the montage of Ghost Busters. With acquiring this new shell that has supposed lineage to the GB1 production, I decided that this new shell would become my display pack at home. And so begun my usual dive into insanity with modifying something to be how I want it to be. . .
The shell came to me looking like this:
This shell boggles my mind when I stare at it. On one hand, it has certain things that look like they got right with this mold, but then other things that are either missing or completely wrong along with all the deformities.
I wanted this pack to look like a Hero fiberglass shell from the production of GB1. To do so, I had to remove, change and/or add to the shell. The above photo has the things I wanted to change circled. Once the shell was in hand, I began to modify! First came filling in the 2 holes that are on the pack for the vacuum hose on the crank knob and the top of the sync generator. Next came the “■■■■■■■” on the EDA Discs, as well as sanding down the spot for the PPD, which was shaped wrong. After those things came some bigger stuff, such as removing the deformed Clippard Valve disc and the cast in N-Filter. Lastly, I tried my best to get rid of the “bulge” that’s on the side of the sync gen, near the clippard valve. The real packs didn’t have this and it always bugged me every time I saw a pack built from this shell.
I clayed in the hallow N-Filter and fiberglassed over it. Once that was all set up, I flipped it over and cut the N-Filter. The result of that process is in the above photo.
Another thing that I noticed yesterday was the top rib of the PowerCell was missing the connecting material between the rib and the EDA.
So I filled that in too!
And with that, I felt confident enough to texture the ■■■■■■.
After texturing, I added a few of the “tells” seen on the heros. These consisted mostly of sanding marks on the ribs, some cuts on the bottom of the crank gen, and visible nails on some of the ribs of the crank gen and powercell.
After a coat of Lacquer and then a coat of primer, I am brought to this lovely point in the build:
The shell is now much closer to what I feel was what the production shells for the hero packs in GB1 were. Now I can start building it all up! Some of the next few things I will be doing is cutting out a motherboard for the shell and mounting it on there with aluminum L-Brackets. Stay tuned for more hijinks!
