[OnEdge]

Hey everyone! Its been a very long time since I last updated this thread, but basically I lost some steam with the project so I put it away for a while. Over the past few weeks though, I really missed having something to work on so I decided to get it back out. When I last worked on it, things changed and some of it is bad and good news. Long story short, I restarted again. Now you might be thinking “wow this guy is never gonna get this project done if he keeps restarting”, and you might be right about that, but! I have reasons for this and it’s not all bad news.

To understand what happened, we have to rewind a little bit. In October, Halloween was coming up and of course I wanted to dress up as a ghostbuster again, only there was one slight issue. My V7 Fan Expo Pack was still in very bad condition from that con. I thought I could fix it up, so I spent a day making repairs to it for Halloween and thought it was okay to be used again. On Halloween day, the whole thing fell apart! Although I made a new motherboard, my shoddy foam system completely failed, the L brackets all broke off so the whole shell and gun came crashing down to the ground. This basically totaled the pack as it made all the parts glued on fall off. I was not too surprised that that happened, but I was still a little sad. As soon as I got home, I decided to just scrap the whole thing and salvage some parts that could still be used.
After this incident, I no longer had a pack that I could use for trooping and I didn’t want to use my GB1 foam pack and potentially dent/damage it (maybe I should’ve started a styrene build from the very beginning lol). Thats when I had the idea to make a “V7.5” pack, one that is meant for going out with, but would be built far better and last. I wasn’t sure what the basis for this pack would be though, but as I continued working on my GB1 pack, I remembered that a lot of the top section parts I had already made were from the same poor quality foam that was used on the Fan Expo pack. It should’ve been obvious, but the quality of foam board makes a real difference in how your final result will turn out. I used to use white glue to attach parts, but this caused warping and was a mess, so I tried using a glue stick instead with some good quality foam for the sync gen and it turned out great! I also realized that I had a lot of old parts I collected that I wasn’t going to use for my GB1 pack like a Heavy props bumper, a BoK motherboard, nfilter, and ion arm.

All of these factors created this perfect storm that I could just use what I had already built for my new trooping pack, so thats exactly what happened. For this pack, I also decided to stop worrying so much about perfection and its been coming out great! Heres how shes looking. Some of those parts are from the old pack, but I’m really happy with how the cyclotron and crank gen looks compared to my old pack.






Heres the two together, poor thing



Meanwhile for my GB1 pack, I was actually able to rebuild the entire top section relatively quickly and they are some of the best parts I’ve made in a while! I hope I can start the sync gen soon for this one.




When I first began this project nearly 2 years ago, I always imagined it as one build, but the truth is that this thread has basically been a documentation of almost 4 builds. I never anticipated it would take this many twists and turns but this journey would have never happened if I had just bought a spirit pack. Right now, I want to finish my trooping pack before I get back to working on this build full time. I’m anticipating it will take around a month, and I’m not sure if I should document the progress here or if I’m allowed to make a new thread for that build. Anyways, sorry that its been such a strange journey. I know the forums are a little bit quiet, but GBFans will forever hold a place in my heart. Thank you so much to everyone for sticking with me on this journey and for reading, all comments are welcome

[alphabeta001]

Shame to see the version 7 got damaged, but 7.5 is looking good so far.
To be honest they are all looking amazing and it's great to see you carrying on with the builds

[edspengler]

Wow what a great build, I can’t believe I am just catching up on it now! I have not felt the inspiration lately to work on things, but reading through your build diary is motivating!

[OnEdge]

Shame to see the version 7 got damaged, but 7.5 is looking good so far.
To be honest they are all looking amazing and it's great to see you carrying on with the builds

Thanks for always sticking around! Its been quite the journey haha.

Wow what a great build, I can’t believe I am just catching up on it now! I have not felt the inspiration lately to work on things, but reading through your build diary is motivating!

Wow! I’m really glad my build was able to inspire you I appreciate it . I’m looking forward to your finished build!

[OnEdge]

Okay everyone I got good news! The shell for 7.5 is finally done . I decided I would post the updates here since these two builds are so intertwined but I’ll start from the beginning. I apologize in advance for the amount of images in this post, theres a lot to share!

One of my most procrastinated areas of the pack was the corner plate. It’s a relatively straight forward part to build and it was one of the last things stopping me from moving onto the next phase. I got scarred from using EVA foam on my last pack since it was so unstable, so I wanted to try using the method Chris Bosh did in his build, which was to create a channel to fill putty in. I also did this method for the cyclotron. In the past I disregarded filling/sanding, but it became more apparent that the project would benefit a lot if I did.

I cut out the base and the top and measured it to create the sides.





I then moved onto to finishing up the gun mount. On my last pack, I didn’t like how square the ribs were considering how rounded off they were on the real pack, so I wanted to try and bend it over the edge to get that effect. I cut out the entire shape, and used my heavy metal ruler to create the bend. This was also how I made the bend for the sync gen. I also sanded the corners to round them.





I admit that the ribs didn’t come out the best since I didn’t cut the rib long enough so I had to add extra material at the bottom of it. One other thing I wanted to share is that I also remade the bridge from gun mount to the crank gen since I also wanted the edges to have that nice rounded look like real packs. Believe it or not, it took a lot of attempts to get it right (those darn measurements) and I still didn’t get it quite right for 7.5, but for 8 I was able to get it perfect.






I then proceeded to finish up the details on the crank gen. I just had to add some styrene plastic to cap off the PVC pipe and used some foam board that I just ripped the paper off of to finish that taper I made. I also made the EDA discs from pex tubing capped off with styrene. I didn’t quite add the rivet detail since I was feeling lazy, but I’ll definitely try doing that on my next pack. I was now finally able to move onto filling and sanding! I decided I was going to try and use wood filler since epoxy putties like milliput/magic sculpt seemed a bit too expensive for me. The first parts I wanted to do were the cyclotron, corner plate, and crank gen.

Before I started to fill, I sealed the parts with white glue. Heres the parts with their first filling. A note on the cyclotron: When I was originally building it, I messed up the height of the sides, so when I attached the base, the cyclotron was way too tall, so I had to rip off the base and hack away at the side with a blade to shorten it up. This made it so the cyclotron doesn’t actually sit flush whoops! The top also naturally ended up bowing because I placed the bumper on top of it when I finished it.






After it all dried, I then began to sand away. This stuff wasn’t easy to sand and it was hard to get the shape right, but I bought some new wood filler when I ran out, and it was much easier and better to work with. After a lot of rounds of constantly sanding and checking, I decided it was good enough since it was so much work getting everything perfectly smooth. I then wanted to attach everything together so I can begin working on filling and sanding the seams.

Heres the crank gen, gun mount, and corner plate all attached together. I’m genuinely really happy it all looks! Especially that darn crank gen. I’m so glad I went with this route and not how I was going to do it in the past.



Heres the shell fully attached, this was such an awesome moment for me after so long!



Before I started to fill and sand everything for the last time I realized something. I forgot to add the sync gen plates. That was pretty embarrassing so I quickly cut out all the plates, and made the boxes at the bottom out of the same styrene plastic. I was then able to finish sanding and start painting

Heres that finished result.



I then coated the whole thing with white glue, and I wanted to try something new. We all know already about the texture on the hero packs and it’s specific look. Homax wall spray was the primary method of replicating it, but my experience with it is terrible and it’s super hard to get right. Even when you do it right, it doesn’t look all that right. Chris found out that Krylon truck bed texture worked really well, but I couldn’t find anywhere that sold it, and ProTex was not an option either. I was not interested in buying many different texture sprays just to see what it would look like either. I then remembered how Chris said he tried stippling Elmers glue on and that intrigued me. He said it wasn’t close enough, but I thought that if it looked good enough for me, I would be happy with it so I tried it on a small test piece and it surprised me because I thought it looked great! I thought this pack would be a great candidate to try that method out so I did that and followed RedSpecial’s guide on where the texture should be.

Heres that small test piece.



When the glue from the stippling finally dried, there was a bit of a problem. A lot of air bubbles formed from the stippling process of the glue, so when it dried those air bubbles stood out like a sore thumb and looked bad. The texture itself wasn’t too bad and I think its way better than that bumpy mess that was on my last pack. I think this method might have some potential for my GB1 pack, so I’m gonna see if I can maybe experiment more to see if I can get rid of those air bubbles. There wasn’t much I could do at that point so I painted the whole thing with Rustoleum grey primer, and with that, the shell was finally done!





















Finally heres a picture with the bumper on .



The shell is imperfect in so many ways, but like the real pack, it’s still so beautiful . The paint really helped me feel better about the result, and it is such a gratifying feeling to stand back and look at it to say I built it. I’m getting closer to finishing this one, I just have to build a few more parts and then attach everything together. Thank you so much to everyone in the community for their research and guidance, and for reading this post!

[tobycj]

For the air bubbles, you could try gentle heating with a heat gun once applied.

[alphabeta001]

Love it. Even with the air bubbles it still looks great.

Nice to see a build that is physically made

[edspengler]

The shell is imperfect in so many ways, but like the real pack, it’s still so beautiful .

AND you made it yourself! That is quite the achievement that very few people go after. Excellent work!

[OnEdge]

I was finally able to find time again to work on this project and I feel like I’ve made a lot of exciting progress that I can share . I also wanted to say thank you for all the support!

I decided that my first step was to modify my SMC elbows. I saw other people do this like edspengler in his build and it gave me the confidence to try doing this myself. so I bought some brass pipe online and went to work. The first thing I did was pull off the end pieces, and start cutting the brass pipe when I ran into a bit of a problem. The brass pipe I got had too small of an outer diameter! I went for 4.5mm OD because I tried using the insert piece from those compression nuts for the fake legris straights which I thought was 5mm OD, but I was wrong. It also happened that I saw GohstTarps build thread where he used 5mm brass pipe off of amazon and I had a big facepalm moment. I decided I didn’t want to let the pipe I bought go to waste, so I used it anyway, but next time I’ll get 5mm OD pipe.



I then masked off the areas with tape and went to painting it with Rustoleum gray primer and I didn’t have any appliance enamel like what edspengler used. Later though, I remembered I still had a lot of the Watco clear laquer in satin spray that I had used to seal the crap out of the Homax texture on my old pack, so I thought to try that while I was painting and it worked great!



Here’s what my finished elbows look like. Definitely not too bad, but the OD of the brass pipe bugs me and I think I cut them too long too. Next time I’ll do better for sure




After that, I moved onto making all the parts that bolt onto the shell, like the booster tube, injectors, filler tubes, vacuum pipe, hga, etc. I was contemplating between 3D printing all the parts or cutting them out of all the PVC pipes I still had which were collecting dust. I decided to go the second route since I didn’t want the pipes to go to waste and to also save some money, but it won’t be so accurate since all the pipes are the wrong diameter. The first pipe I cut was the booster tube. I realized I ran out of the pipe I used for this originally, and I didn’t want to go buy more so what I ended up doing was using the old pipe from my old pack, and cutting it to the proper angle. This made the pipe too short, so I took my old HGA, and hacked off a tiny piece, then I super glued it on and filled and sanded it. Not ideal, but it works for now. I also made my booster plug from pvc pipe, and some floor mat EVA foam. The booster plug fits pretty good into the pipe, but I’m worried it will fall inside it and I’m not sure how to glue it in. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d appreciate it!





I then made the HGA by cutting it from my old N Filter, and I capped it off with styrene, and added hot glue welds. Those fake welds took me forever because I was trying to make them individual beads. They don’t look particularly great, using epoxy would have definitely looked better and saved time, but I’m on a bit of a tight budget with this pack.



I then used some pex tubing to cut the filler tubes, and I was able to buy 1/8” thick styrene so I was actually able to cut the baseplates unlike last time. I also added the fake hot glue welds to the baseplates too. This was my first time working with 1/8” styrene and its awesome lol



I salvaged the old injector tubes from my last pack too, and sanded it. I then cut the baseplate from the same 1/8” styrene, and also capped them off with more styrene. I again added the fake hot glue welds.



I made the vacuum pipe from more PVC that I salvaged. I then cut the circular baseplate and oh my god it was a NIGHTMARE to cut that thing. I was scoring for probably more than an hour, and I ended up just using a hacksaw to cut around the damn thing and snap it. Came out pretty good though!



The last part I made was the PPD, and this time I got the angle for it right. The originals were resin filled, but I didn’t want to go through all that effort so I capped it off again with styrene.



Here’s all the parts together before and after priming. They’re definitely not perfect and have some inaccuracies, but I’m a lot more happy with how these parts came out compared to my last pack!






I then decided to start on the v-hook. The Hasbro Neutrona Wand that I’m using for this had a v-hook piece that I didn’t use since I used a 3D printed v-hook last time. That v-hook didn’t work very well and cracked so I wanted to try using the original piece it came with and looked into some options for the male piece. I ultimately decided to just make it myself after seeing Batfly make his out of styrene in his build (it also saves money lol). I measured the female piece of the hasbro v-hook, and traced/cut the pieces out of styrene. I also used pliers to try and snap off the more tricky pieces. Heres what those looked like.






The next day, I sanded those parts clean so it can fit into the female piece better and have a cleaner appearance. I still need to drill holes for bolts and paint it, but for now this is done!




The next part I wanted to work on was something I was dreading for a while, which was to reshape the BOK motherboard to fit my shell better. The motherboard was cut oversized so I didn’t have to worry too much about it being too small in some areas. It created the problem though that there were a few areas where it was way off. The really bad culprit areas were where the spacer was, the top of the power cell, and the corner plate. I decided to take this to my friend’s place to get his help with this since he has a lot of power tools and a grip sander which was SO useful. Heres some pics, just ignore our very unprofessional setup








Heres some photos of what the finished result looks like in these areas. These areas looked really bad but they fit so much better now and I’m really glad we were able to get it done!






The last thing I did was finally attach the BOK N-Filter onto the shell. The BOK N-Filter’s diameter is too small compared to what is accurate, and it also came to me looking super rough so I had to sand the top of it and the sides to make it more smooth. I don’t know why I did this so late into the build because I should’ve done it during the initial sanding stage. I had to sand the opening out a little better so it would fit, and then I hot glued it to the shell and reinforced the inside with more hot glue. I then took wood filler to fill in the gaps and sand. I tried to also fix some areas of the cyclotron.



Heres what it looked like after the first round of filler



After a lot of filling and sanding, we’re back to this point





I’m not actually super happy with how the roundness of the cyclotron came out still. In the photo above you can tell it looks really rough and I also think its not sharp enough compared to the real pack. In this photo of the super hero’s cyclotron, you can see the sharpness of it very clearly. I also think I was growing a bit impatient with how much sanding I was doing so I rushed it a little bit and said it was good enough. I was using medium grit sand paper for the whole thing so I should’ve probably switched to a much finer grit later on to smooth it completely. It might be the wood filler’s fault too but I’m not sure, it could be a bit of both. The cyclotron is one of those parts on the proton pack that I have a very specific eye for. I want the roundness of the cyclotron to look better for next time so I would appreciate any comments about this!



Anyways, thats it for all I’ve done so far! I made one last final order from GBFans with everything I need to finally finish this beast. I’m running out of things to do until then, but I think by the end of this month, we will be done! Thanks for reading

[tobycj]

I decided that my first step was to modify my SMC elbows. I saw other people do this like edspengler in his build and it gave me the confidence to try doing this myself. so I bought some brass pipe online and went to work. The first thing I did was pull off the end pieces, and start cutting the brass pipe when I ran into a bit of a problem. The brass pipe I got had too small of an outer diameter! I went for 4.5mm OD because I tried using the insert piece from those compression nuts for the fake legris straights which I thought was 5mm OD, but I was wrong. It also happened that I saw GohstTarps build thread where he used 5mm brass pipe off of amazon and I had a big facepalm moment. I decided I didn’t want to let the pipe I bought go to waste, so I used it anyway, but next time I’ll get 5mm OD pipe.

What's the inner diameter of your brass pipe? Typically it's 0.5mm wall thickness, so 5mm OD pipe will have a 4mm ID, so unless you've got 0.25mm wall thickness your ID is likely to be 3.5mm, which will be too small for the red tubing to feed into.

[OnEdge]

Good catch! Yeah I was worried about that too but I did end up ordering the pipe with an inner diameter of 4.1mm so it does fit my tubing properly. I’m really contemplating on remaking the fittings even though they work okay.

[OnEdge]

I’m back with more updates and I’ve been really hard at work trying to finish this thing! I decided to take the entire build over to my friend’s house to get his assistance and also use some of his tools, so I’ve been going over to his place whenever I can. There isn’t many photos of progress that I took which I apologize for since I’ve really just been focused on hitting it hard.

The first thing we decided to do was to bolt the alice frame onto the motherboard and I actually bought the correct hardware for this unlike my last pack. It was my first time ever drilling through metal and bolting something together for the pack, so it was pretty scary for me. The one thing that was difficult was trying to make sure our holes aligned for where we drilled on the frame itself. We managed to do it but we messed up very slightly but it isn’t noticeable and works just fine. Comparing the strength and rigidity of having the frame bolted onto the motherboard already felt like such a leap compared to when I zip tied the top of it last year haha.




After that, I realized we had to reinforce the inside of the shell if we wanted to start mounting parts on. I decided to revisit paper mache to reinforce the inside, and we used some old printer paper instead of newspaper with white glue this time. We decided to do 3 layers of it all around the shell to try and strengthen it to the best of our abilities and it took us 2 days to finish it. We had a problem though on the face of the eda where the white glue started seeping into the seams of the joints, so it ended up severely warping that area. There wasn’t much we can do about that so we moved on but after that, I still wasn’t sure about how strong the shell was, so I seriously started to consider researching how to fibreglass. More on that later though. After that we drilled and tapped basically every part and we tried to use the tape method to transfer the holes onto the shell later. (More on that later again as we ran into a few complications)



I wanted to try mounting at least one part on, so I chose the filler tube. We encountered a problem though where that area of the spacer was way too shallow to fit a 1/4-20 socket cap head bolt, so we instead used a 1/4-20 pan head phillips bolt without a washer. I’ll try to correct this problem for V8. We then decided to mount the vacuum pipe onto it’s base which was just one 1/4-20 socket cap head screw.



The next step was to finally attach the shell onto the motherboard which I was seriously dreading since I was terrified to try and drill through the L-brackets. Before that, we decided to do something easy which was to cut styrene squares to glue onto the areas where the bolts would be for the shell. This was something I had been planning for a while in an effort to make sure the shell never comes crashing down onto the ground. For the gun mount, we cut an extra big piece of styrene that went all the way up to the top because that piece is also supposed to support the new v-hook I made. I had been planning how to strengthen the v-hook ever since the day it failed on me a year ago. This new method should be much more stable from the styrene since it will be glued to the shell as well as being bolted from the l brackets. We drilled the holes on the shell and then placed the shell onto the motherboard to try and mark the holes onto the brackets. This is where the picture taking became an extremely low priority because mounting the shell felt like a battle to us beginners. We didn’t have a punch to mark the holes properly, and a pen/marker was not fitting into the drilled hole. The most we were able to do was just a tiny dot from a pen, so we got to drilling and this was one of the most involved parts on the entire pack build so far. We had a lot of trouble trying to drill through the brackets because of our lack of experience and we almost had an incident where we ruined one bracket. Luckily we were able to get it all done and the last bracket went much more smoothly after we got the hang of it which was not to go so fast drilling. Our holes were not very precise, so mounting the shell onto the motherboard always ends up being difficult. In hindsight of all of this, we learned a lot for V8, and I’ve since done a lot more research onto how to do this more properly (which I should’ve done from the start). More on that later again.



When that was finished, we were able finally able to move on, but then we ran into another complication with the ion arm. The BOK ion arm is completely solid and it was way too heavy. We were getting super worried that the heavy ion arm would break the EDA and wouldn’t last. We also ended up messing up the tap for it, so we decided to create a new one from scratch using styrene. Batfly’s styrene scratch build helped a lot with trying to figure out how to do this. I essentially cut a giant square that had all the panels on it, and then scored off the pieces I needed, and also used pliers to help get rid of some pieces too. I then superglued it all together, primed it grey, and reattached the end cap.




We then started to move onto attaching everything else to the shell. I mentioned we used the tape method before which worked on some pieces but not so much on others due to the nature of some the parts I made such as the booster tube. The angle I cut wasn’t the most precise so although I placed a piece of tape on the bottom to try and transfer onto the EDA, it wasn’t exact so the holes ended up being off. We ended up filling the holes on the booster tube with wood filler and redrilled them from the bottom with the holes on the shell. This ended up working but it was a little difficult trying to bolt everything together. We were able to secure the booster plug with one of the bolts for the booster tube too. The ion arm was also a bit of a mess as we messed up marking the holes on the tape from rushing. We were able to try again the next day after we filled the holes and we kind of messed up again but it ended up working out. On some of the other parts like the hga, I took some sign plastic, drilled a hole for a bolt, put the bolt through the hole and secured it with a nut, then I superglued the nut, and removed the bolt creating a thread. I then glued that sign plastic into the HGA so we were able to use that to secure it. After we had messed up so much with mounting the parts, the one part we had to make sure we did right was the bumper. The Crix bumper had small indents for where we were able to drill which helped a lot, so we drilled those out, then we aligned the bumper onto the shell. A slight issue with the Crix bumper was that its too short because the bottom is too wide, so theres no clearance between it and the cyclotron. We just ended up raising the bumper up with playing cards to get a half inch clearance, and we very carefully marked the holes for the bumper on the shell, double checking that we got it right. Then we drilled the holes for it and we bolted the bumper on while we were panicking that we messed it up, but we got it right first try which was a major relief! After that it was time to attach the bellows. I bought this resin part without the modeled screw, but since this pack was going to be a GB2 pack, I had to find a bolt for it but I had no luck. The only thing I found close enough was a brass slotted pan head screw, so I used it as a decorative screw that would get painted and just used a long bolt through the cyclotron into the bellows. Finally, almost every single part that needed to be bolted on was done, and we attached the shell onto the motherboard and we were able to stand back and appreciate the work we did, so here’s what it looks like




Even though we ran into so many problems with the assembly, it was so gratifying to see the work we put in all come together like this. All the parts are so much stronger compared to when I glued them on before, and the new solution for the v-hook shocked me, its ROCK solid and is not going anywhere. Our next steps to finally finishing this thing are to mount the electronics, wait for the rest of the parts like the labels/tubing from GBFans, paint and weather it, and then we are finally finished with this one. I seriously have to apologize for messiness and the extreme lack of images in this post, theres instead just long walls of texts here which I usually don’t like doing, so I might go and take some more photos later on and come back in here to put them in.

I wanted to also take the time to share a few small updates and future plans for V8. Building this pack has taught me so many new lessons in the assembly stage since it was my first time doing it like this. I’m definitely planning on buying a notebook to fill it to the brim with research and notes on every single part so I can easily refer back to it (Such as how I should’ve placed the shell on the motherboard and drilled the holes at the same time). I mentioned earlier that I’ve been doing a lot of research on fibreglassing for the new pack and I think I’ve came to the conclusion that I will do it for V8 to further reinforce and strengthen the pack. I was seriously concerned that doing this would be catastrophic because of how the paper can warp, but after seeing other builds using the Pepkura method with fibreglass, it blew my mind so it gave me the confidence to do it to my future build too. I will also switch to Magic Sculpt putty instead of using wood filler for things like the cyclotron. Anyways, thanks for reading this long wall of text of a post!

[edspengler]

Wow what an adventure! It looks wonderful!

[alphabeta001]

Well done that looks amazing. Can't wait to see it painted and kitted out