User avatar
By Lowberg
#4953577
Hello my fellow Ghostheads. Now that some official reference of the Afterlife proton pack has been released, I have decided to get started on my build! Even though the forum is a little sparse these days, I love a good build log so I'll be document my progress here!

I decided that my first proton pack build from like 2012 would be a good candidate for an afterlife conversion. Some of the Afterlife parts require some invasive modifications and I'm not about to drill giant holes into any hero quality aluminum parts. It has all Nickatron resin parts on it, some of which will honestly match the Afterlife look better like the Ion Arm casting having clean edges (no weld lines).

Here is that pack in the current sate. It has served me well as my "trooping" pack for conventions and has seen a lot of shit and repairs over the years (Like one time when we rigged up our packs to shoot about 150 cans of silly string into the crowd at a St Patricks Day parade....my god that stuff took hours to get off the shells :lol: )
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I decided to do the majority of the heavy Afterlife pack weathering first, as It would be easiest to do in the pack's semi-unassembled form. Very first thing I did was to lightly mist my shell with Rustoleum Flat black from about 4 feet away. Just to dull the existing Satin Black finish down a tad.

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After that I went to town on the majority of the weathering. I used Testors Model Master silver paint and a combination of a very fine model brush and small foam wedge brushes to do my weathering. The small model brush is great for the more defined bits, scratches ect. The foam wedge is amazing for light scratching and speckles, emulating "worn" areas, and feathering out damage. The key with the foam wedges is to use a "dry brush technique" where you wipe the majority of the paint off the brush so there's BARELY any paint on it and you essentially use it totally dry to just put very minimal random marks and texture on.

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I used a combination of the GB App Afterlife pack photo, the Adam Savage Tested teaser video frames, and some of the promo shots of Phoebe in the cornfield testing the pack to get most of my damage reference. Then went over small sections of the pack one at a time trying to emulate the same markings as close as I could. It's not perfect but most of the same damage is there and looks good enough for me.

Bumper Damage
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Right Side Damage
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Left Side Damage
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N-Filter Damage
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cristovalc, Nighty80, Prime 1986 and 6 others liked this
User avatar
By Lowberg
#4953619
Little bit more progress:

Did some weathering on my resin clippard valve.
I've noticed on the new pack and thrower, the clippard valve label looks blackened and the metal part of the valve has lots of weathering on it. I dirtied up my valve label and sides with black acrylic paint smudges and added some spottyness to the top of the valve as well.

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Next I added the brass union fitting to the left side of the EDA, I used the opposite side of the union inside the shell as a nut with a rubber O-ring to lock it down. I needed a flexible black cable for this part, so I made use of a broken guitar cable I had laying around and some heat shrink around the end that's inside the nut to keep it snug and tight.

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Next was the yellow braided cable. for the cable core I just used small electrical hookup wires I had in my shop and picked some interesting colors and twisted them together.

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For the part of the yellow cable that "plugs" into the cyclotron, instead of drilling a hole I cut one of the new strain relief fittings so it would sit flush with the shell and fitted the inside with a small neodymium magnet. I attached another magnet inside the shell so cable snaps right into place and is held by the magnets :)

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For the GB1 style ribbon cable, I did some black/grey/brown acrylic paint light weathering to dirty it up. Wiped on and off with a paper towel

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With all the new cables assembled in the P clamp:

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Nighty80, tobycj, kahuna900 and 4 others liked this
User avatar
By Lowberg
#4953895
Little bit of weekend progress:

I built the new ion arm weld plate out of a few scraps of styrene and epoxy putty for weld marks.
I put masking tape on the surfaces it was to conform to and built the epoxy putty welds over the masking tape, as well as some epoxy putty behind the corners to make a "custom" fitting piece, almost like a prosthetic.

When the epoxy putty cures you can peel the masking tape off and paint the piece separately which will fit perfectly to the curved booster tube and side of ion arm.

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Painted and installed:
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I also just got a 3D printer (Wohoo!) so one of my first test prints was the heatsink that goes on the side of the cyclotron.
I used copper coated aluminum craft wire, some thick paperclips and a computer chip for the greeblies. I tacked all the greebles in place carefully with CA Glue Gel and hit it quick with CA glue accelerant to quickly cure and avoid the weird off-gassing white spots CA glue can sometimes leave behind when curing. Whole heatsink assembly attached to the shell with 6-32 button head screws and nuts from the inside

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By Lowberg
#4957100
After returning from a nice much needed vacation, I spent a couple afternoons diving back into the build!

I spent a lot of time thinking about the easiest way to tackle the new ion arm and crank generator switches. Since this was a conversion pack that I had initially built years ago, I did some less than ideal things in it's original construction. The hollow resin ion arm was attached with a wooden plug, epoxied onto the shell so getting it off to cut holes for a inside mounted switch seemed out of the question. My solution was to make surface mounted switches.

I 3d modeled (the best I could with my very limited skills lol) and printed some switches that I was able to paint separately and attach with very strong double sided tape. I think they came out pretty and it's not too noticeable that they are surface mounted with everything else going on around them.

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A big relief was tackling the clippard disc wires. This was fun....not.
Thankfully, the Afterlife hero pack reference photos provided by Adam Savage were very helpful in placement and arrangement.

For my copper colored wires I used copper coated aluminum craft wire. I'm not sure what they used on the hero's, either copper wire or insulated wire but I felt I could make this work. I used 16-14awg ring terminals from Ace hardware and removed the plastic crimp parts and crimped them onto the craft wire, and then wrapped them with strips of copper tape.

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I noticed a few of the wires were black insulated wire and they enter the shell through 2 small holes, one above and one below the clippard disc. Reference photos helped a lot with placement!

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After this huge pain in the a** was completed, I went though and did a little spot weathering with black acrylic paint applied with a paper towel to dull down the copper wire and give them a greased and old appearance.

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By Lowberg
#4957282
Moving on to some of the smaller details.
I made a little wiring sprig that we can see bulging out of the vacuum tube split loom on the pack. Some small colored wires, electrical tape and clear tubing.

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Ripped up and weathered yellow label
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Added other small things like the electrical tape and clamps on the red wires, OD green tape, little more black weathering on the shiny plastic parts.

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Still have some small tasks to do and then I plan on finishing the weathering process on the shell and parts to dull things up a bit and tie everything together, but I'm really satisfied how it's looking so far!
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By Zulaxia
#4966900
Amazing mod and I'm totally using this as the basis for mine now. Where does one set of the copper wires vanish to behind the ribbon and yellow sleeved wires? I'm having a nightmare finding clear shots and Adam Savage didn't seem to cover that. I can see one set goes up to the booster eyelets, but do the others just go into the shell along with the ribbon etc?

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