#461403
I bought one of Alkaline's very first pack shell's over three years ago. During that time I have slowly collected parts to build this pack. About five years ago I built one from scratch. The majority of it was made out of wood and found parts, but as close to accurate as I could afford at the time. Picture of the Mark I below:

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Anyhow, fast forward to earlier this year I met Kolten, the guy running the SLC chapter. His pack was awesome and inspired me to finally start piecing mine together. I'm hoping to get it done in time for a Halloween themed gallery show on October 18. I have been so busy working on it I forgot to start this thread.

Lots of parts from AJ. Need to put in another order this week.

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The Ion Arm is all finished. Excited to have real resistors and an accurate cap.

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For the entry of the loom on the middle of the pack, I used this putty to mount a washer to this PVC. I am pretty happy with the results.

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Here it is mounted to the shell.

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For the opposite end I mounted a wooden dowel to the body. It's a tight fight since it is split-less room, I will have to sand this down a bit.

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More progress pics soon. I still need to track down a few parts this week. Anyone have any suggestions on a nice shock mount? I can make one out of washers, but I'd rather get something more accurate. Also coming up soon, I am working on my Throwing Chicken kit along with a light kit from Krix.
KoCo, AJ Quick, Vee liked this
#461615
Garvin do you have pictures somewhere? I'd love to see it.

More progress made today. Mostly on the gun, I need to get more parts for the pack before I can get too much more done. specifically socket head screws. Tonight lots of prep work on the Krix kit I got. Crimping those little wire was a pain, and dabbed a little solder on there to secure them. Hoping to have some time tomorrow to fire it up.

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I glued the handle to the front of the barrel and screwed on the rear handle. I will replace the screws with rivets soon.
AJ Quick liked this
#461891
Played around a lot with the electronics kits. Those little wires are tough. Crimping them and soldering them didn't go nearly as smoothly as I had hoped. I moved back to general assembly so I could make some progress.

I went to a local industrial supply store and picked up a bunch of socket screws and bolts. With these I could finally mount the barrel onto my gun. I didn't want to commit to permanently mounting it with epoxy.

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Here it is attached. Much more secure than I thought. I may try to squeeze a washer to bump the barrel out a little so it's more flush all around the cylinder. Maybe I could use some putty to pad it and sand it down.

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Here I am measuring out the bumper screw holes. I don't know why, but this part makes me the most nervous out of the entire pack. Mounting this sucker:

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Oh and I also got the ribbon cable clamp mounted.
#462145
I almost forgot about that. I will have to bondo it in the finishing stage, coming soon. I spent quite a bit of time with the shell. I disassembled the body and started filing the edge of the fiberglass mold. I am actually pretty disappointed how rough parts of it are. I filled the air bubbles with liquid epoxy. Today I plan to rebuild some of the broken off edges with a two part putty epoxy.

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While I had the files out, I also touched up the rectangle for the lights. Looks much nicer now.

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My mother board I got off eBay showed up. Thankfully it fits perfectly. I was really worried about finding one that wasn't a bad fit.

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#462418
I used the rest of my two part epoxy putty rebuilding the edge of the shell. This should be a good fix. It will require a lot of sanding and finesse, but it will be worth it.

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Some of the corners were cracked and very thin, I rebuilt these as well and strengthened the inside of the shell.

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Next update, lots and lots of sanding. And probably more putty.
#462605
As promised, lots of sanding. Unfortunately I found some more weak spots. Lots of cracking. I do prefer this nice clean edge though:

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And this rebuilt section looks much better.

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Tomorrow night, more sanding and putty. If all goes according to plan I should be priming and painting this weekend. I still need a few parts, hopefully I can track them down soon.
#463304
I spent the weekend sanding, filling and painting. Lots of those three things. Plus lots of paint fumes.

The grooves on the pack have been the biggest pain. Lots of bumps and cracks. I have spent more time on those than anything else. These photos are the filling, primer, sanding and then using a dremel to grind down the high spots inside the grooves.

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Now for my painting process. I have been doing two coats of self etching primer. Sand those smooth. Clean it with some paint thinner, two coats of metallic paint. After that dries hit it with a enough black to cover the metallic. For the bumper I put on some painters tape where I knew I wanted metal to be showing.

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To keep it from looking like I just taped off the metal, I roughed up the edges with the edge of a screw, rough sand paper and a wire brush. Because I didn't rough up the metal paint, the black coat comes off pretty easily. I am hoping just general wear and tear will add to the look of authenticity.

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Here it is all finished. I plan to burn some paper to add scorch marks, and maybe some brown paint to add rust. So far so good.

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And now for the Ion Arm all set to go.

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Pack and gun all primed up. Probably needs a few more passes of filler and sanding.

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All the parts are here! Just need to put in the time. Getting this done by Friday will be a photo finish.

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KoCo liked this
#463646
Thank you, sir. Some random kid gave it to me ;) Lots of progress. Still a long way to go. Here I cut out the whole for the split loom.

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HGA is all ready. Beat up where it will be exposed.

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I am really proud of how the thrower is turning out. This picture is washed out, I will take better ones soon. But the photo should give you the idea of the beat up metal I was going for. I also started taking paint thinner evaporated on a rag to buff the paint a bit. Gives it that worn in feeling.

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I painted the pack metal. Tomorrow I'll assemble the rest of the gun, paint the booster and pack all the way to black. Last step will be mounting the motherboard to the pack and alice frame. Oh, and then the lights, of course :D
Vee, KoCo liked this
#464655
Sorry for the delay in update. Trying to get this ready by last Friday sucked all my time. After the show I was a bit burned out and needed some down time. Anyhow, here's an update of all the recent stuff.

Injector tube dowels. I glued these together and added a little epoxy channel. I really wanted to make these look uniform on the pack. Eventually these will be upgraded to metal:

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Lots of coats on the shell. Primer coats. Metal coats. Black coats. Plus a few primer coats on the inside for good measure.

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Unfortunately in the 11th hour a couple of spots on the fiberglass broke. Luckily I could do some patch repairs. I will need to revisit these spots though and rebuild them with the Milliput.

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Damn, looks good with the bumper on the flat black shell.

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Next up were the acrylic lenses from Crix. I used some 3M double stick tape to mount these. It's solid, but easy to swap out if I get the video game light kit with clear lenses. In the first photo you can see I framed the blue lens with some electrical tape. The acrylic lens didn't rest flush, and I was out of sanding time. The tape helped keep any light from sneaking out of the sides. In the second photo you can see I have put some steel wool and capped it in there with the sexy hot pink tape.

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Due to time constraints, another temporary fix. I plan to frost the lenses and get some reflectors for the cyclotron lights.

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Mother board prepped. Unfortunately the nuts I epoxy'ed onto the L-brackets broke loose. I will need to weld those on or find a better solution.

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I am really happy with how organized I got the inside of this shell. My first pack was a rat's nest. The split loom clamp isn't mounted to the mother board yet. I will need to do that.

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It all worked out, I ended up having my pack finished enough to wear to the show and prop up next to our podcast table. Kolten and Wes were also nice enough to attend. You can see Wes' car parked out front of the venue.

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Oh, and of course, here is a picture of my pack in it's current state. I still need to fix some of the broken shell, while faking up some weathering. Some little knobs here and there, as well as some labels. Crix's light kit still giving me trouble, so I'm not quite done with that yet.

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#466494
I have an Alkaline shell and notice the same issues you contended with. Some brittle areas and unevenness of the edges. I'm going to lightly epoxy the entire interior I think... OR just use it as a stunt pack and get a better shell outright. Whichever.
#4788703
I finally got the electronics set up in this. Lights and sounds. Waiting on the amplifier now. I added the stickers too. The rub on decals were difficult. My mistakes just make it look more worn, which works. Lots of finished photos:

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I added some of the colander mesh to the inside of the vent. I like the consistency this adds.

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And here is my hidden soundboard power switch. You can't see this without looking, and it cuts the power to the sound chip and the soon the amplifier.
Sutton621 liked this
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