- April 13th, 2015, 11:29 pm#4831183So the maker of this turd has been posting all over Facebook about how he's so proud of his creation, even leaving creepy comments on my girlfriends page and our franchise page. I've decided to type up a comprehensive list of everything that was wrong with it and everything I did to make it bearable. Enjoy.
While handling it the very first time:
- A piece of the slime blower had broken off inside and was rattling around.
- The front gun grip fell off.
- A section of the blower barrel broke off. Not a greeblie stuck on, but a piece of the tank portion of the blower attachment itself.
- You could see through the resin on the blower because the resin was so thin. We held it at eye level and a dim overhead light in a parking garage shone through.
- The blower attachment on the wand was loose and wobbled.
- The wand barrel was crooked and wobbly.
- He did not include wires to run the wand lights to the pack.
- The small slime hose on the front of the wand was loose and leaking then popped off.
- The clippard on the wand fell off.
- The knurled knob on the wand fell off.
- The bike light on the pack near the ion arm had broken loose and was dangling by a wire.
- The green slime tank on the pack was wobbly.
- He did not include padding on the neck bar of the Alice frame, though he said it would have extra padding.
- The beam line tube was comically floppy and loose.
- The blue lens on the power cell was cut too small and there was an ugly gap between it and the shell.
- The hole he had cut in the shell for the power cell lights was crooked and uneven.
- Similarly, the slot for the wand bar graph had been so sloppily cut that it looked like an oval and the yellow lens he placed over it was too small.
- The shell had popped loose from the mobo because he didn't screw his giant wood screws into the flimsy sintra brackets properly.
- The ion arm was splitting off from the shell.
- The pack did not sit flush on the mobo.
- The pack was very thin in places and the flashing lights were visible through it.
- He did not include game-accurate detailing on the pack gun mount.
- Did not include the additional game accurate box next to the cyclotron.
- The vent nozzle was a crudely modified crank knob and not accurate to the game.
- There was no additional detailing for lights on the power cell.
- It did not have TVG accurate lights on the pack.
- Nearly every decal was of low quality and printed on cheap paper by a cheap printer. They were fuzzy and looked like printer paper.
- Decals on the clippards (pack and wand) were peeling off. Most other decals were peeling or had completely fallen off.
After we drove it a half hour to our house (the first night we had it) and I had more of an opportunity to look it over:
- While moving the wand back and forth, it split in two where the barrel meets the body.
- The red lens for the video game caution / vent light popped off the pack.
- Wires all over the pack and wand immediately slid out (they had been punched into the foam with nothing to hold them and just naturally fell out). 3/4 of the wires had fallen out or broken loose within a few minutes.
- The lens on the bike light broke in half. This whole piece had been recast and was not a real bike light.
- The ion arm rod broke off when I barely touched it.
- The filler tubes under the power cell were wobbly.
- The trigger box on the wand crumbled into pieces.
- A portion of the blower tube crumbled where the front barrel grips had been. Cracks were forming all through this piece and it was disintegrating.
After a small amount of dissecting and looking it over (first night cont. and second night)
- Pieces had been glued in place with very little super glue or hot glue. Everything had been glued to paint or to some kind of plastidip material and they ripped right off. The material also had too much give and was squishy so pieces like the red warning light didn't have anything stable to grip to.
- Pieces that weren't glued in place had a small piece of copper wire shoved into them - then the other end was stuck in the foam. Naturally there was so little friction holding them in place that gravity, movement or the slightest pressure (SLIGHTEST pressure) caused these parts to fall out.
- The slime blower casting was incredibly thin at the base (the widest part closer to the rear grip). There was substantial pooling of resin at the front end.
- The 2 main halves of the wand (body as one half, front barrel the other) had been secured with a single screw. It had stripped out the incredibly cheap, brittle, soap like resin and the two halves had separated entirely.
- The bottom piece of the wand had a few big, nasty screws drilled through it and into a thin piece of sintra. This was to hold a large piece, including the dixie hook, in place.
- That sintra piece was itself screwed into the edges and corners of the gun box. Many of those screw holes were stripped and screws slid out with the touch of a magnetic screwdriver. Other screws had missed the gun box entirely and weren't screwed into anything. And others were screwed into some foam like material that would provide nothing for the screw to grip onto. This piece had been superglued down to the gun box. A small amount of superglue was likely the only thing keeping the bottom of the wand together.
- The interior of the wand was just a mess of some kind of foam like material, sintra and some other paper-like sign material (obviously cut from signs, possibly "Free Sprint phone" sale signs from radio shack or something).
- He had drilled holes that were too large or used switches that were too small because some of them were secured with some brittle bondo like material. It looked terrible from the outside and frightening from the inside. One of the switches broke loose and fell inside the wand.
- It looked like he soldered a few wires for jupiter wand led's and he did a positively terrible job at it. Some led's had shorts or had completely separated and didn't work. Some wires looked scorched and melted and nasty.
-The wand bar graph had been installed upside down.
- His extra video game style lights in the wand did not work. He had told me in advance they were christmas lights and would not be accurate but I expected them to work, at least.
- The enlarged vents on the wand were crooked and look terrible. He also accidentally painted some of the diffuser material he put in the vent. It all looked very sloppy and ugly.
- The enlarged heat sink looking thing on the side of the gun wasn't flush with the gun box.
- He used blue tinted resin on that piece to help make the interior lights look blue. This resin is full of bubbles and looks bad when the lights shine through.
- It was missing a trigger tip on the gun barrel. Also the gun barrel was not properly frosted and doesn't look long enough.
- The slime tank was stuck to the filler tubes. The filler tubes were made of shitty, brittle foam. He used long, rusty screws that look like they came from a barn to screw the tank to the tubes. I believe one good tug would destroy this entire piece.
- Filler tubes were riddled with holes. It looks like he positioned them wrong or was trying to devise different a way to mount the tank and just drilled wherever he wanted, then made no attempt to fix or cover his mistakes. It looks like garbage.
Upgrades and repairs I did:
- Stripped it entirely. Didn't take much because nearly everything had already fallen or broken off.
- Painted the inside black so you can't see through it. Interior lights don't shine through.
- Reinforced the outside shell and the mobo with rigid epoxy spray. I only had time for one coating but it helped harden the outside quite a bit and helps keep the mobo from flopping so much (it bowed and bent every time you took a step). It could use a few more layers of this spray.
- I repainted the outside satin black and re-weathered it.
- I added spacers between the mobo and the alice frame. He had riveted it directly to the frame.
- I moved the center bolt on the mobo up about 2 inches to its proper location, and this helped with mobo stability and kept the top from flopping as much.
- I added a new bolt from the alice frame just under the neck bar to the mobo. This keeps the mobo almost completely rigid and reinforces my speaker.
- Added a 5" speaker and it is just deafening. Like possibly too loud. Painfully loud. He told me sound wouldn't work because the foam would soak it up. This obviously isn't the case.
- Added a GBfans sound kit.
- Reinforced the external parts with copious amounts of gorilla super glue gel and bolted pieces down where possible.
- I cut out the 2 additional lights on the front of the power cell and the small circle shaped light on the side of the power cell. I also cut a larger hole for the red caution/vent light. I used the Crix pack lights for the cyclotron. I used the jupiter lights for the power cell and the new lights on the power cell and for red warning / vent light.
- I added green lenses on the cyclotron.
- Attempted to secure the filler tubes with more screws and lots of glue.
- Took the same approach with the slime tank.
- Rebuilt the bike light and mounted it with velcro.
- I frosted the wand barrel and added an aluminum trigger tip.
- I added a gbfans wand kit.
- I used the Jupiter wand kit for the extra TVG wand lights.
- I drilled out the tip of the blower and added a green led. It's wired to the GBfans Aux output and fires green any time the gun fires. I also added a simulated slime effect to the inside so it looks like it's going to shoot green liquid instead of green light.
- I attempted to add a new screw to hold the wand in place but there wasn't enough resin or space to work with. I ended up gluing the screw in place and slathering the exterior in gorilla glue, jb weld and quiksteel.
- I also glued the blower attachment down to the standard wand barrel. It's secured with screws but it was loose and wobbled. It doesn't wobble now.
- Replaced the clippard and glued it in place.
- Replaced the knurled knob and glued it too.
- Repainted most of the wand and tried to fix the many, many light leaks.
- Reshaped the opening for the wand bar graph (inside and out since there was a large build up of foam behind it).
- Added a reflector for the vent light.
- Replaced the diffuser for the wand vent.
- Rebuilt and reset the trigger box.
- Reattached the gun grips.
- Replaced the slime in the small hose on the wand.
- Added a few new high quality GBfans decals to the pack.
- Added a 12v blue brick battery setup to replace his too-damn-many-9v's setup (I'm convinced it was a scheme to sell more radio shack batteries)
- Attached the wand and hose to the pack and gun. He wants to attach the slime hose with a single wimpy screw on each end that goes directly into this cheap, soft resin. This yanked out immediately and I don't currently have a way to securely attach it.
- Glued and repaired the torn spots on the shell as best as I could. I also added strips of duct tape along the inside around these spots. Not the most elegant solution, but it seemed to have worked.
- He used really flimsy sintra shaped into an L instead of aluminum brackets. It's almost impossible to actually screw into these because they want to flip backwards when your screw touches them. So your screw is never going into the pre-drilled hole at all. It's a frustrating and time consuming process to attach your shell and more often than not you end up drilling a new hole in the sintra. Problem here is that you can't tell if you're making a good connection - you could just have the tip screwed into the sintra, which is sitting at an angle. This means it could just pop off at any time, especially while walking. Very frustrating and scary.
- The wand isn't that heavy (about as heavy as my Throwing Chicken wand, maybe even less so). He thought it would be a good idea to secure the dixie hook to the pack by putting a small piece of wood on the inside of the shell. But the shell is so thin and fragile that the weight of the wand pulled the piece of wood through the foam shell. Also, the spacer he used between the dixie bracket and the shell appears to be rotten wood and it split and fell off.
The only good things I have to say about this is that it's light weight. In his defense, the main reason I bought from him was because I needed something light. Even with 4 sets of electronics, a big battery and big speaker, it's still very light. The wand also looks accurate (though when looking at HQ screen caps, you can see some inaccuracies).
But it was so fragile. So, so fragile. A tiny bump would break it, a slight tug would pull it apart and you could crush this wand with one hand. My upgrades and rebuilds added very little weight and it's now so much sturdier and quite a bit better looking.
This was a poorly engineered, poorly fabricated, poorly constructed piece of junk that is easily, far and away the single worst prop purchase I've ever made on every conceivable level. The seller is lazy, a liar and not too bright. And damn is he a creepy weirdo.
This was not a good value, at over $800. This would be a good value at $100 for someone who needed it a week before Halloween. This is advertised as a stunt pack with detailing like a hero. The detailing was sloppy and inaccurate, and it's far too fragile to be a "stunt" or a "beater."
Lando System?
Lando's not a system. He's THE MAN.
- By Fritz
- By pda4ever
- By GhostFaceX
- By tobycj