[BearKlaw89]

After having my flightsuit for over a year it seems about time that I finally make a proton pack. It would be neat if I am able to finish this by Halloween to go rock some costume contests.

Started last friday by cutting the motherboard out of some wood I had lying around.



Spacer built out of EVA floor mat foam.


Body of Clippard is a film canister. I ended up replacing the foam board with a couple sheets of thin craft foam raising it up.





I had some extra red material used to wrap drums, that seemed like a perfect filter for the cyclotron lights. Still unsure as to how I'll go about electronics to light them up.





Added a Pringles can N-Filter. Ended up a little too big but I think for this first pack I can handle the N-Filter coming off the bottom a little bit. I also took a dremel to the cyclotron to round off the edge better.


Got a bunch of fun metal splinters but I got the wire screen into the N-Filter last night. After failing to find a screen door repair kit as I had hoped I ended up taking apart a bathtub drain cover.


Hopefully will work more on it tonight but not sure as I'll be helping a friend sand the bondo on his pep pack.

Cheers,
Shawn

[Paul-Butt]

Looking good.

[GBfan77]

If you are planning to use Spray paint I recommend you test it out on a piece of scrap. Yeah I know, it's something everybody tells you no matter what project but some spray paints react badly to foam. As in they break the foam down to it's basic components. I don't know if this is the case for all foam materials though.

[Mr_Stay_Puft]

When building my foam core pack I used the sheets of craft foam for the ribbing and everything else is foam core board. Using Krylon grey primer and Krylon satin black spray paint to paint the pack. With the foam core board it is essential that the foam is covered before spray paint is applied or the foam between the two sheets of card stock will be broken down. The craft foam sheets however acted totally differently by sucking up the paint. Different kinds of foam will react differently to spray paint so it is definitely good advise to test any foam pieces first to see if it reacts badly to paint.

[Alan Hawkins]

Krylon also makes a spray paint that is water based and it works great on foam! Search "Krylon H2O". We used it in our foam packs.

[SpaceCoastGBs]

The easiest way to seal your foam is give it a few coats of paint-on Mod Podge, then primer, then paint.

[BearKlaw89]

Thanks for the advice! My current plan was to seal everything with a few coats of white PVA glue, and then coat the pack in polyurethane as shown in this tutorial by xrobots: http://xrobots.co.uk/coating/

I didn't get to do much last night but I did pick up a short strand of battery operated christmas lights to temporarily use as lights until I get something better. While it is less accurate I kinda like the effect given when I stuck a couple into the N-Filter. I may keep them in there when I actually attach the lights.

[BearKlaw89]

Life got in the way and I wasn't able to do much more to this pack before Halloween, but that's ok. I hadn't wanted it for any specific halloween event anyway.

I just finished making progress on a couple more parts:





My HGA is two spray paint can lids that I stacked and then cut to size.



My blue gel is a weird serving dish from Dollar Tree, that I cut apart and layered 3 times.



And here is my progress so far. Taking rather longer than I expected but I'm happy with how it is coming along.