Ok, yes my pack is far from anywhere near accurate, its not even pretty to look at! but I did manage to pull this off in under 8 days and while many of my methods were less then conventional I think/hope, someone can get something useful out of this. For the record I dont recommend 90% of the way this was built…when I did it, I had no idea the amount of info on this site, only knew of the build plans, like Stefans, Norms etc.
The idea was I wanted to build something between the dollar store pack and the pretty vacu formed ones that cost a lot more. I wanted it to be sturdy cause as much as its far from perfect I knew I would have a lot of time into it and didnt want it to fall apart on the first night. I was also able to build this pack for around 60.00 complete and with very few tools. So maybe someone with little money to invest and no access to a full shop can build one too.
I dont have a whole lot of pics but I will post what I have and explain what I can from there.
So for starters I went Home Depot and got some hobby board, its strong, has no wood grain look and is thin enough to work with without adding too much weight. I looked for the styrene board everyone kept talking about but never did find it, nowing I couldn’t do everything out of hobby board (too heavy) I went searching. I found some corrugated sign material at work and got a couple sheets of styroboard from michaels.
I had a hard time with some of the build plans I found here and ended up using a few different ones to make one pack. but between them all I was able to get some parts started.
I built the mother board with Hobby board. Spacer with 2 layers of hobby board, inside and out “not stacked” and did the corrugated sign material around the outside and I used a cake pan from a goodwill for the cyclotron with washers and since I work at a body shop there were tons of red tail light lying around for me to cut up for my lenses. The N filter was an aluminum water bottle, another goodwill score.
I built the power cell, booster box, Ion arm and Gearbox out of styroboard. The problem with this stuff is that you cant spray paint it, I new that going into it but again, time crunch. So what I did was make as few exposed edges as possible and put a light layer of plaster of paris.And believe it or not that stuff was actually very strong when all glued together. I cut all of these out using a razor blade and gorilla glue.
As you can see I completely missed the PPD, and wasnt sure how everyone was supporting their Injector tubes, but not wanting it to be flimsy I used an L bracket. My gun mount box was again hobby board for strength. and my hose connector disc as well as my “clippard” and mounting plate were a combination of household lids and a little pvc.
I got everything coated with a rubberized undercaoting to protect it from weather and give it texture. threw a couple screws in the end of my ion arm and an extremely oversized copper tube, haha. I really wanted to do my plating but couldnt figure out in time how to do it with what I had, considering all of my hobby board was cut out with an old jigsaw.
Knowing I wasnt gonna waste my time with electronics on this build I threw an old wifi card inside my power cell for looks.
This is pretty much how the pack looked when I headed out. Luckily for me the only other ghostbuster I ran into in downtown Portland was a guy with a suit and an inflatable proton pack, when I walked I heard his girlfriend say “wow look at his proton pack” and he replied “yeah ■■■■ that guy” haha,
The only problem I had all night with it was a drunk guy running into my ion arm and breaking it from the pack. Luckily I had supplies on hand to fix it.
On to the gun. This was by far the hardest part, I couldnt find the pieces for this thing anywhere and I cant even begin to count the hours I looked for them (in all the wrong places).
but I was able to find some switches and old stereo knobs that I felt were close enough…
so this is the gun pretty close to done minus some weathering and little details.
So this was my first shot at anything of the sort and given knowledge and time im pretty proud of it. Great things to come in the future though:)…dont hold me to that haha.
Last pics are of it stripped down a little after Halloween, I was planning to fix it up a little but have decided to completely scrap it and build a new one from scratch
