View new posts | View your posts The new guy's scratch pack build

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After a lot of reading on these forums and talking to some friends about materials I have started to build my pack. My ultimate goal is to use what I'm building to make a mold so I can cast a fiberglass pack. I felt that the fiberglass packs looked the best to me, and I the challenge of it seemed fun too. My master mold or plug ( the term escapes me right now) is going to be made of insulation foam and styrene. I figured that those materials would be the easiest to work with. But I had to find something to cut the foam with first. I ended up making a hot wire cutter and mounting it on a router table, which worked out really well.


I took these pictures with my phone but I'll take some with a real camera soon. I'm also pretty bad at remembering to take pictures while I work. So let me know if there is anything I should take close ups of. If your wondering I'm painting the foam with gesso, that's why some of the pieces are white.







Just a couple pictures for now but I'm anxious to read what you guys think so far. I'll get better pictures up asap.

Wow. This is really impressive. Keep up the good work!

Here are some more pictures. The pieces are still a bit ruff and I have a lot of priming and sanding to go. If I do make a silicon mold from these parts how smooth do I need to get them?









Here is how I got the flat spots on the spacer.

Thats looking really good man!

I think Alkaline or Exoray can confirm, but you want them to be a smooth as humanly possible. The less defects your plug will have, the better!

Killer!

You want them as smooth and as CLEAN as possible. If you touch your pack and leave an oily fingerprint on it. The silicone will pick it up.

nice job sir!

looking great so far, very smooth..

any updates?

I really should have updated this sooner. But I didn't have anything new for a while so I put it off. I decided that even though I put a ton of work into my foam pieces. I wasn't happy with how the preparation for molding was going with them. I would prime, sand and fill blemishes only to find more blemishes from the process. The foam was just too soft. I don't know if it was just me being to rough with it or what. I tried to be as careful as I could but more dents kept showing up. So I 'm now restarting the process with wood. I don't have any pictures of that just yet but I have been hard at work on the neutrona wand, which I have lots of pictures of. It's made of styrene and pvc pipe and I am very happy with how it's turning out. Let me know what you think.

lookin perdy so far! keep it up and this pack will be a great success!

Wow. That thrower is wicked.

I don't know if you know this or took it into account, but most foams (including insulation foam) get eaten by any kind of aerosol spray.. I think it's the xylene that's in the paint/primer.. eats through foam like acid. If you're going to use any sort of aerosol product on foam, you've got to seal it first.. a mixture of white glue and water works well for that.. a couple of layers should do the trick..

That thrower is awsome! I think if you were to use the correct style brass barbs on the green hose it will really bump your build up a notch. Also I have some resin R-701 casts with real 701 labels in stock right now along with accurate grips and guntracks etc. shoot me a PM if you'd like to order any of those [/shameless plug]

Your right about the foam gets eaten away by a lot of things not just paint. It doesn't really like bondo either. But I was coating it in gesso first as a buffer to the finish coat of paint I was going to use.



I was wondering if people were going to catch the brass being a bit off. The hardware store I usually go to didn't have the right ones. I thought these might be a decent substitute but I was wrong, I'll be hunting down some better ones soon. As for the clippards I was just looking into ordering some. I'm thinking of getting the real thing when it comes to those. However I've been scratching my head over how to make accurate grips, so I might take you up on the offer for that.

You have a great eye for detail, your build looks great. Keep up the good work.

Looks like your off to a great start. Please dont put in the plate for the injectors on the bottom of the power cell. many people sell injectors mounted on the plate so attaching them to a shell that has the plate already sculpted in leads to a hassle. Also contact member "mburkit " He has info on the correct shape of the powercell and the placement of the ribs. He posted pics in another thread but i couldnt find it. He seems like a real good guy and im sure he will help you out.

Since I'm redoing all of those parts I'll make sure to omit the plate on the bottom of the power cell, thanks for the tip! And I'll look around for the "mburkit" post. Does he have more accurate dimensions than the Stefan plans?

Just a quick update, I just got some real aluminum knobs for the gun but I have yet to secure them. I hope to have some more build pictures this weekend when I get a chance to really spend some time on the project. By the way thanks for all the kind words on my progress everyone!

Yeah so when I said this weekend I guess I should have said a couple months. But I have an update now. It's all done! the plug for the mold at least. Once again I did a terrible job of taking pictures of all the steps it took to get to this point but here's what I have. (there are a lot so I'll put them in spoiler tabs to keep things tidy)


I used spare 2x4s and particle board. The particle board was a pain to get smooth. I filled the pits with bondo. I should have used plywood instead, but I had big sheets of spare particle board. I wish I had pictures of these pieces before I primed them. The primer I used was Rust-Oleum auto primer. Once again I had this laying around but I ended up liking the stuff and got more to cover all the pieces, it sands very well.

Here is the cyclotron with the N-Filter and rings for the lights. I made the rings out of .125" styrene in order to get the right inner and outer diameters. The N-Filter is just two pvc couplings glued together and then cut to length. It's probably not visible in these pictures but I also sanded the sides straight on the disc sander. They were a bit wavy before and this hid the seem as well. the top was capped with a styrene disc I made by drawing a circle on a square piece and sanded the four corners down to the line I drew. I then repeated that until it was a circle. That's how I did all the discs on the pack.


Here is how it looks right now. I have and initial coat of gloss paint on it to make it smooth for the molding process but that's it. I need to do a little more sanding here and there but it's basically done. (If I never have to sand again after this project I'll be very happy)



I have yet to start a bumper but I have a shockmount I made out of washers. I think it turned out pretty well, but let me know what you think. My goal was to make everything that I could myself, but if it looks crappy this would be one of the pieces I'd get from someone else.


So that's my very late update. Sorry I didn't take more pictures to show you guys the process a little better, but when I get working on projects like this I tend to get severe tunnel vision. I'm now looking for a local supplier for the silicon to start the mold. I could get it over the internet but wont shipping costs be kind of expensive? That's it then I'm anxious to hear what you all think. Or if there's anything I need to change or improve on.

Stellar work there, extremely crisp edges and details.

This is really an amazing build. Great work!

Great looking scratch buid Jester. Everything turned out very clean.

Very nice man. Love the spoiler tag usage too....

Very, very nice.

I went out and got the materials for the actual mold today. I was originally going to go with the brush on silicon style mold but after talking to the guy at the supply store I when with urethane rubber. I was told that with parts of the pack being so deep that the urethane might be a better option and that the mold making process would be easier. I now plan on making a box around the plug and pouring the urethane over the whole thing all at once. or maybe painting a thin coat on first to make sure there are no bubbles and then pouring the rest. I'll hopefully then have a big block with a proton pack negative in it.

Also I'm going to be starting my lights soon. As I was looking around for LEDs I found something interesting at a computer modding site. What do you guys think of these for cyclotron lights?http://www.xoxide.com/ledacfomodr.html They also have some interesting things that could be used for a power cell.http://www.xoxide.com/logisys-corner-16-blue.html And these for throwers or traps. I'm thinking I could make the blue power cell bar for less though.



You'll notice that one of the boxes has a label for a slightly harder urethane. The store didn't have any more of the 20A so they said that this will stiffen up the mold a bit but not to much. I wasn't sure that I would need all three gallons so if I have to use it, it might not be too much.

Dang dude, this is coming out RLY nice.

So I have a box built around the pack. I then put a big garbage bag in the box on top of the pack and started to fill it with water since this is the easy lazy guy way of finding the volume that I need to fill with the urethane. Let me say in my defense here before I go any farther I was overly excited and wasn't really thinking some aspects through. I bought three gallons of urethane rubber thinking that should be enough to fill the void around the pack (so did the guy at the store by the way). In order to make sure three gallons was enough I poured three gallons of water in the garbage bag. It hardly got to the top of the sych gen. I then stood there staring at it for a while completely bummed. So I went back and calculated the volume of the box I built and the volume the pack takes up, and it turns out that I would need nine gallons to fill this thing. The reason for this is the N-Filter, which I almost didn't put on. Making the mold with urethane requires at least a half inch of space around all the parts including the highest point the N-Filter. That leaves a ton of blank space above the rest of the pack. So I tried filling in some of the spaces and subtracting that from the total (that's what the triangle spaces are at the bottom of the pic) but it wasn't enough. My plan now is to exchange the urethane for silicone.

your bottom cyclotron rings are too big. if youre gonna spend the money to mold this pack, you ought to try and make it as accurate as possible.