I’m back with more updates and I’ve been really hard at work trying to finish this thing! I decided to take the entire build over to my friend’s house to get his assistance and also use some of his tools, so I’ve been going over to his place whenever I can. There isn’t many photos of progress that I took which I apologize for since I’ve really just been focused on hitting it hard.
The first thing we decided to do was to bolt the alice frame onto the motherboard and I actually bought the correct hardware for this unlike my last pack. It was my first time ever drilling through metal and bolting something together for the pack, so it was pretty scary for me. The one thing that was difficult was trying to make sure our holes aligned for where we drilled on the frame itself. We managed to do it but we messed up very slightly but it isn’t noticeable and works just fine. Comparing the strength and rigidity of having the frame bolted onto the motherboard already felt like such a leap compared to when I zip tied the top of it last year haha.
After that, I realized we had to reinforce the inside of the shell if we wanted to start mounting parts on. I decided to revisit paper mache to reinforce the inside, and we used some old printer paper instead of newspaper with white glue this time. We decided to do 3 layers of it all around the shell to try and strengthen it to the best of our abilities and it took us 2 days to finish it. We had a problem though on the face of the eda where the white glue started seeping into the seams of the joints, so it ended up severely warping that area. There wasn’t much we can do about that so we moved on but after that, I still wasn’t sure about how strong the shell was, so I seriously started to consider researching how to fibreglass. More on that later though. After that we drilled and tapped basically every part and we tried to use the tape method to transfer the holes onto the shell later. (More on that later again as we ran into a few complications)
I wanted to try mounting at least one part on, so I chose the filler tube. We encountered a problem though where that area of the spacer was way too shallow to fit a 1/4-20 socket cap head bolt, so we instead used a 1/4-20 pan head phillips bolt without a washer. I’ll try to correct this problem for V8. We then decided to mount the vacuum pipe onto it’s base which was just one 1/4-20 socket cap head screw.
The next step was to finally attach the shell onto the motherboard which I was seriously dreading since I was terrified to try and drill through the L-brackets. Before that, we decided to do something easy which was to cut styrene squares to glue onto the areas where the bolts would be for the shell. This was something I had been planning for a while in an effort to make sure the shell never comes crashing down onto the ground. For the gun mount, we cut an extra big piece of styrene that went all the way up to the top because that piece is also supposed to support the new v-hook I made. I had been planning how to strengthen the v-hook ever since the day it failed on me a year ago. This new method should be much more stable from the styrene since it will be glued to the shell as well as being bolted from the l brackets. We drilled the holes on the shell and then placed the shell onto the motherboard to try and mark the holes onto the brackets. This is where the picture taking became an extremely low priority because mounting the shell felt like a battle to us beginners. We didn’t have a punch to mark the holes properly, and a pen/marker was not fitting into the drilled hole. The most we were able to do was just a tiny dot from a pen, so we got to drilling and this was one of the most involved parts on the entire pack build so far. We had a lot of trouble trying to drill through the brackets because of our lack of experience and we almost had an incident where we ruined one bracket. Luckily we were able to get it all done and the last bracket went much more smoothly after we got the hang of it which was not to go so fast drilling. Our holes were not very precise, so mounting the shell onto the motherboard always ends up being difficult. In hindsight of all of this, we learned a lot for V8, and I’ve since done a lot more research onto how to do this more properly (which I should’ve done from the start). More on that later again.
When that was finished, we were able finally able to move on, but then we ran into another complication with the ion arm. The BOK ion arm is completely solid and it was way too heavy. We were getting super worried that the heavy ion arm would break the EDA and wouldn’t last. We also ended up messing up the tap for it, so we decided to create a new one from scratch using styrene. Batfly’s styrene scratch build helped a lot with trying to figure out how to do this. I essentially cut a giant square that had all the panels on it, and then scored off the pieces I needed, and also used pliers to help get rid of some pieces too. I then superglued it all together, primed it grey, and reattached the end cap.
We then started to move onto attaching everything else to the shell. I mentioned we used the tape method before which worked on some pieces but not so much on others due to the nature of some the parts I made such as the booster tube. The angle I cut wasn’t the most precise so although I placed a piece of tape on the bottom to try and transfer onto the EDA, it wasn’t exact so the holes ended up being off. We ended up filling the holes on the booster tube with wood filler and redrilled them from the bottom with the holes on the shell. This ended up working but it was a little difficult trying to bolt everything together. We were able to secure the booster plug with one of the bolts for the booster tube too. The ion arm was also a bit of a mess as we messed up marking the holes on the tape from rushing. We were able to try again the next day after we filled the holes and we kind of messed up again :sigh: but it ended up working out. On some of the other parts like the hga, I took some sign plastic, drilled a hole for a bolt, put the bolt through the hole and secured it with a nut, then I superglued the nut, and removed the bolt creating a thread. I then glued that sign plastic into the HGA so we were able to use that to secure it. After we had messed up so much with mounting the parts, the one part we had to make sure we did right was the bumper. The Crix bumper had small indents for where we were able to drill which helped a lot, so we drilled those out, then we aligned the bumper onto the shell. A slight issue with the Crix bumper was that its too short because the bottom is too wide, so theres no clearance between it and the cyclotron. We just ended up raising the bumper up with playing cards to get a half inch clearance, and we very carefully marked the holes for the bumper on the shell, double checking that we got it right. Then we drilled the holes for it and we bolted the bumper on while we were panicking that we messed it up, but we got it right first try which was a major relief! After that it was time to attach the bellows. I bought this resin part without the modeled screw, but since this pack was going to be a GB2 pack, I had to find a bolt for it but I had no luck. The only thing I found close enough was a brass slotted pan head screw, so I used it as a decorative screw that would get painted and just used a long bolt through the cyclotron into the bellows. Finally, almost every single part that needed to be bolted on was done, and we attached the shell onto the motherboard and we were able to stand back and appreciate the work we did, so here’s what it looks like 
Even though we ran into so many problems with the assembly, it was so gratifying to see the work we put in all come together like this. All the parts are so much stronger compared to when I glued them on before, and the new solution for the v-hook shocked me, its ROCK solid and is not going anywhere. Our next steps to finally finishing this thing are to mount the electronics, wait for the rest of the parts like the labels/tubing from GBFans, paint and weather it, and then we are finally finished with this one. I seriously have to apologize for messiness and the extreme lack of images in this post, theres instead just long walls of texts here which I usually don’t like doing, so I might go and take some more photos later on and come back in here to put them in.
I wanted to also take the time to share a few small updates and future plans for V8. Building this pack has taught me so many new lessons in the assembly stage since it was my first time doing it like this. I’m definitely planning on buying a notebook to fill it to the brim with research and notes on every single part so I can easily refer back to it (Such as how I should’ve placed the shell on the motherboard and drilled the holes at the same time). I mentioned earlier that I’ve been doing a lot of research on fibreglassing for the new pack and I think I’ve came to the conclusion that I will do it for V8 to further reinforce and strengthen the pack. I was seriously concerned that doing this would be catastrophic because of how the paper can warp, but after seeing other builds using the Pepkura method with fibreglass, it blew my mind so it gave me the confidence to do it to my future build too. I will also switch to Magic Sculpt putty instead of using wood filler for things like the cyclotron. Anyways, thanks for reading this long wall of text of a post!