THE CHALLENGE
So, a friend of mine was going to an '80s fancy dress party and decided he wanted to go as a Ghostbuster. A very cheap one. I volunteered to build him a super-cheap proton pack because I enjoy that sort of thing much more than he does. I only had a couple of weeks and it had to cost about £20 ($34).
THE CAVEATS
I have no construction skills, very few tools and no workshop space to speak of.
(I have a shed, but I can’t actually get in it because it’s full of ‘useful’ stuff. Stuff which is rarely actually useful.)
Given the limitations on time, money and my inability to build anything half-decent I figured I could just tape a load of cardboard together and that would do. My friend wouldn’t care - he’s not looking for accurate, just looking for something vaguely recognisable to the general public. After finding this forum (and being completely blown away), I opted for something a bit harder wearing than cardboard and more in the vein of Bradester’s Dollar Store Pack
Something like that would be more than adequate.
AND SO IT BEGINS …
Um … there are going to be a few pics now.
This was my haul from Poundland - £4 worth of Tupperware and £3 worth of paint (a can of grey primer and 2 cans of black). I also bought six tubs of cocktail sticks for £1 which might be useful and four lights for £2 which would probably fit inside somehow. Maybe.
This is the bits laid out on some chipboard backing which fell off an IKEA bookcase when I was moving my lounge around recently. I couldn’t be bothered to put it back and I think it looks better here. The white bits are foamcore. The black pipes (injectors?) are cut from a single length of pvc pipe which is going to be my A.L.I.C.E. frame alternative. (Which may be cheap to buy, but are expensive to ship to the UK!)
The same view from the side.
Ten minutes later, I’d decided the spray can lids didn’t look right and went for the first few cocktail stick tubs. That’s 200 cocktail sticks I just threw away. The booster is (clearly) a juice bottle.
You can see the Clippards in this shot. The tops of the valves and the bases are lids from mini-cosmetic things I’d been stealing from everything I could find for a week or so by this point. I know the bases are supposed to be elliptical, but … well, I’m treading the line here between accurate enough to keep me happy, time and building for a guy who really won’t know the difference.
Cut out (badly) with a gun mount added. I had no idea what the wand would be made of at this point, but I figured it would need to be solid enough to hold whatever I ended up with - hence the scrap bit of wood from my shed.
Some last minute cosmetic plating because it was all looking a bit plain. I know this is much shallower than it should be. I did toy with adding depth, but decided against it. My plan was to drill and bolt the Tupperware to the motherboard through the lids - putting cardboard boxes between them and the board would just weaken everything.
Three more cocktail stick tubs here. Another 300 cocktail sticks in the bin. Also, some ‘gels’ ripped out of old file dividers I had in my office.
Primed!
Sprayed! Including a booster frame cut out of foamcore, the ■■■■■■-less top from an old baby’s bottle and an empty spice tub liberated from the kitchen.
Masking removed to show the colour gels. Also, wires from the powercell to the cyclotron can be seen here. I’m still not sure exactly what the plan is, but it’s going to light up somehow.
I was a bit stuck about what to do for the red and blue tubing … until I found metres and metres of clear plastic tubing in my shed. I have no idea where that came from, but wrapped in red and blue electrician’s tape and it kind of works. The ribbon cable is from an old PC in the loft. The crank knob is three ‘found’ lids from cosmetics in an airline washbag.
Now with added decals, screws and ion arm. The decals are from you good people here, obviously, the screws came out of an oven I;d just replaced and the ion arm was cake dowel from my daughter’s last birthday, painted with gold paint I found in the shed. Okay, so the yellow label is in the wrong place, but the spacer’s not deep enough to fit it properly and it’s just too pretty to leave off. The ‘resistor’ on the side of the ion arm holder-thing is a broadband filter from the shed of wonders. The brass attachments on the blue tubing are from an aborted head-gasket change a couple of years back.
That photo also contains my first mistake - I bought some aquatic tubing for the pack to wand tubing, thinking I was dead clever. I wasn’t. It was far too inflexible to work.
■■■■■■. Still, on to the wand. I had no idea how I was going to make that.
So I just used some thick card and some Fablon (sticky-backed plastic) which was also lying around in the shed - possibly left over from a Star Trek tricorder I’d knocked together six years ago. The handles are metal, bits of an old wardrobe rail. The grips are pipe insulation gouged out to look a bit grippy. The switches are more left over bits from something I found in the shed. Except for the black push one, which I bought specially.
I think I was about at the budget limit now, but I got a bit carried away and stopped caring.
The pink light wand in the bottom left corner was £1 - it has three LEDs inside and cycles through red, green and blue, flashing all three at once and … something else. Can’t remember, but it looks pretty good in the dark.
It’s alive!
The red light (is wrong, I know) was off the old oven. It, the vents and the bar-graph are all lit by the same £1 light I bought at the beginning of the build. The light is just wedged inside and happily lights all three. The bar-graph is just printed from the decals on here with the back of the photo paper peeled off to make it very thin.
All connected up, all lit up. Nothing cycles or flashes - there wasn’t anything could find cheap enough to make that happen. The lights are all controlled from the wand though, so it looks kind of cool. Kind of.
I also found some hexagonal connectors (in the shed) and painted them gold to look a little like legris elbows. The inside of the broadband filter is glued to the outside of the ion arm holder-thing in place of a resistor. Below that is a cocktail stick holder lid with lines cut into it to look a little resistor-y. You can’t see it here, but it’s there.
Oh, and I weathered the pack with silver paint and a dry brush. Knobs on the gun are all airline washbag cosmetic lids painted silver and maybe a couple of milk bottle lids.
The bumper! A piece of door carpet trim stuff which probably has a proper name but was too cheap to bother reading the package. A bit of foamcore added to make it more bumper-ish.
The A.L.I.C.E. frame substitute - one length of PVC tubing, four elbow bends and two junction boxes with some pipe insulation over the top and some bits of wood cut off a spare leg from my daughter’s bed (it only has three, fitting the fourth one would have involved moving a radiator … so I screwed it to the wall instead). The frame was bent to shape by heating it over the gas hob.
Almost done. The gun is mounted using four flat L-shaped brackets - two screwed to the gun and two to the gun mount so they mate point of V to point of V.
This was a stupid idea. The gun kept falling off so I turned them around to mate the other way around. At this point I discovered it was impossible to get the gun back on the pack, panicked, searched the forum, found out almost no one can do that … and relaxed.
I did notice the hat-knob on the side of the gun was in the wrong place though.
From the side.
And the finished pack. The heatsink is made from lolly sticks cut and glued together. The green tubing on the gun looks odd because it’s masking tape painted green by a six-year-old who was desperate to help. The split loom came from eBay and was a couple of pounds for both sizes.
From the side. The straps were cut off an old rucksack and zip-tied into place. I then immediately cut myself on the clipped zip-ties and had to add more pipe insulation to hide the razor sharp edges.
And that’s pretty much it.
Okay, so it’s too flat and not massively accurate, but my mate was absolutely blown away. He thought I was just going to gaffer tape some cardboard together. To his uneducated eyes, this is as good as the ones in the movie. He’s very happy.
Even happier this evening - he’s just rung me to tell me he won first prize in the fancy dress competition.
So, all in all … a win.
Yes, okay, I went over budget a bit. I lost count, but it was probably closer to £30 ($50) than £20 ($34) … but I had fun and didn’t ask for extra cash, so who cares?
The only problem is … I know I can do better. I want to build my own now. It won’t be anywhere near as good as the packs built by you guys, but it will be better than this and it will be more accurate. Probably.
I have the bug!
