This is for other Ghostbusters Props that don't fit into the categories above.
#4951341
Wow, how sad. If you were in Michigan I'd be there 24/7 helping you finish it up. Right now I'm finishing up my ghost trap (complete with sounds, lights and smoke) and the associated pedal. All that's left is a bit of rub and buff to give it a well used look.

So, then I need to finish writing code for the proton pack and I'll be on to the containment wall. Not sure how far you were able to get with your dimensioned pdf but anything you'd be willing to share with suggested dimensions and parts would be greatly appreciated.

Anyway, if you're interested, I can send you updates and pics of what I've already done and my continuing progress.

Regards,
Jeff
#4951999
I had a talk with the others and they say that they're still very much interested in getting this project done. It's hopeful but I will let that happen when it does. Not going to push anyone about it and I know where that's going to lead, but let's hope that I am wrong about it. With that said, I have gone and pulled the trigger on getting the ECU/Ghost Trap labels made. Unfortunately, the place where we were able to get our low run aluminum/vinyl labels didn't survive the pandemic. I had to resort to the place I order all of my bands stickers from.

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This is the ECU and Ghost Trap label in it's full glory. Go ahead, i'm not even going to watermark it. Just send me a physical copy if you ever get one professionally printed up. Those are my terms. Anyways, the original label was cut in different places and accommodated whichever prop it went on. It was a lot more expensive to have this printed to size and I really didn't want this place screwing up the dimensions, so I opted to put a red border around it that i'll just cut off myself.

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These will take about a month before they'll get to me. I will renew my supporting membership and sell these on here if they turn out the way I am hoping they will. Fingers crossed. Still trying to find another magical place that is able to do low run labels like the last place.

That's really all I have for now. I mean its better news than what I posted before. Maybe this revised sticker will be a motivation factor in getting feet moving again? I don't know but let's hope it will.
#4952985
tobycj wrote: July 21st, 2021, 11:19 am Any idea on price point for the labels yet? I'd love to get one when they're available, I've never seen the lower half done before, and really want that for my GB1 trap pedal!
They'll absolutely be a few bucks a sticker. If these turn out good and the size is accurate, I am thinking about getting some of the other containment unit labels printed up this way.
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By 910dohead
#4955125
I did get the stickers today and I am very happy with the way they turned out. I will be selling these in the forum for $3 a sticker.

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I'll have the red border cut completely off making the label the correct size. Luckily these are exactly the same size as my prototype. 100% weatherproof vinyl. This company I had manufacture these I have been going through since the late 90's. I had a band sticker they made on the back of my truck window and it last 15 years. These will last a very long time.
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By 910dohead
#4968265
It looks like I am back with another update to this build! Albeit it's a small one but things appear to be picking back up again. I'll make this one brief.

In the last big update post we found more reference of a larger junction box after the fact we already bought one. Onlyalad19 just happened to be on the search for one and found just what we needed.

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Now that we have this piece in hand, we threw on some of the labels to make sure we had the dimensions accurate. Everything looks perfect. Looking at the reference images we have, we discovered that this particular junction box has knockouts. It's very hard to see when looking at the images but they're there so we opted to go this route. Getting out the tubing we had to figure out which knockouts were used just by comparison to what is seen with the placement on screen. We thought this next trick was going to be tricky, but it went smoothly.

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It was just that simple. One hammer hit with each hole and it was done. Now to hold the tubing up to see if it works.

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This is exactly what we needed to move forward with this project. We're working on this again in 2 days so we'll see what progress gets done.

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Our next steps are going to be to try and figure out the mech inside of the trap housing that holds that inner trap into place. We have a rough idea but need to build some sort of prototype we can play around with using a trap. That's going to be the last big thing we need to do before we clean up the door and paint. After that it's applying the labels and moving to electronics.

Speaking of labels, some guy that goes by Fannstar on Etsy is selling versions of the labels I created shown in this thread without permission. I have said before that I will release all of that stuff when this project is completed, but this bugs us. What this guy has done is gone and taken some of our labels and made subtle changes to them to play them off as if they were his. I have contacted this guy and asked him to stop selling the labels. While these are prop labels, he has every right to recreate his own versions but two of the labels he's stolen are dummy labels I made up in place of the real version (yes, these have parts photoshopped out cos we saw this coming). Anyways, this stuff will be released when our project is over, so if you're looking for labels, please don't buy from that guy. Thanks.

More progress soon.
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By Nighty80
#4968281
So pleased to see you guys picked this back up, it broke my heart a little when you stopped 🥲
The new addition looks amazing, same as the rest of it - I'm genuinely blown away (and a little intimidated!) by the level of accuracy, genuine parts etc.
Sorry to read that Fannstar ripped off your labels though - I didn't realise this when I ordered a set back in Jan. Out of respect and love for your build (which inspired me to start my own!), I won't use them and will see if I can change my positive review on Etsy. When you do list a complete set, I'll be happy to order from you.

All the best,
Dave
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By 910dohead
#4968286
Thanks for the kind words Dave. Sorry to break your heart a little. Also, I wouldn't be intimidated by this build. It has taken us forever to get to this point and a project that we spend our free time doing. It's wild to me that we started it in 2014 and we're still not through yet. The hard part was all the research. I've easily invested over 1,000 hours trying to find the bumper label alone and that's the stuff you all don't get to see. It's very boring too and I still have no real idea who the manufacturer is.

That guy didn't rip us off or anything but he took our work (made subtle changes) and is making profit on it. I think that's messed up. The three of us working on this thought about the possibility of profit but I don't think I will actually go as far as producing anymore stickers and selling them. I did the trap/ecu label as a test to see if there was enough interest (which I thought made sense since it's used on 2 different props) but I have unwanted stacks of them that I will most likely never sell through. I just plan on releasing the files so they're available to everyone that wants to print up ones for their props.

EDIT - I forgot that I had set the unit up with red lighting during Halloween, so here are a few pictures from then.

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By 910dohead
#4968454
I should've had an update to post tonight as our plan was to finish the junction box, but looking at the reference we have made us rethink what we were doing. That led to a part discovery which also led us down a path to an even potentially bigger discovery (by sheer accident too).

I am 95% certain that we found the manufacturer of the bumper label synchronous motor. More info soon...
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#4968476
Haha, that was exactly my reaction when I saw it. There was a logo we were looking at and I said out loud, "Oh, that kinda looks like the logo that would be on the bumper laaa--holy shit!!"

Right now, I am going to try and find the label. It's a company that's known for certain industrial parts and at one point they made electrical machinery (most likely back in the 70's). This would include blower motors. Unfortunately I still get zero results when I pair the part number to the company name but I assume these are going to be rare pieces. I also get weird google results and can't even tell if the company is still in business. Luckily its here in California and about an hour away from me so I can always just make the trip one of these days if I get desperate. I am going to do a little more digging and if I have no luck, I will turn over what I have found so far and see if it will renew interest in the dormant "Find The Bumper Label" thread. Maybe one will turn up hopefully.
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#4968491
tobycj wrote: March 31st, 2022, 5:28 pm Holy smokes! That would be incredible if you did find it. If you have then we need to set you on the ribbon cable next! ;)
I still think that's proprietary cable yanked from those old school adding machines that used punch cards to figure out mathematics. Most likely something that ran under carpet or flooring.

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#4968492
Here is the company logo which could very well be the maker of the bumper label (which I have redrawn).

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If you're going to search like me, good luck.

EDIT - Also, I just realized that today is April Fools Day and I am not joining in on any sort of joke.

Here, I will go one step further.

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Regal Manufacturing. 900 Ajax Avenue. City of Industry, CA. 91748. A division of Creftcon Industries formed in the 1940's and makers of industrial fittings/couplings and industrial machinery.

"THIS COULD BE IT!"
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#4968836
Troy wrote:HOLY NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK, BATMAN... what a pull!
Sadly it's not the right logo. I have an update coming soon. I just haven't had the time to get to it yet hopefully in the next few days.
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By Spenglers
#4972365
I just spent the greater part of this afternoon pouring over every single page of this thread and all I can say to all of you and your team's hard work and dedication to this project is holy s%^&. Every bit of this project looks outstanding. That you'll eventually release a full set of plans and a parts list will be a truly invaluable gift to the GB community, and prop community at large.
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By 910dohead
#4976203
It's another new year and this small update has been about 7 months in the making. I was supposed to do this post back in May (when this work was done), but life happened as always and shifted our focus elsewhere giving us all sorts of different tasks and projects to accomplish. Then the post almost didn't happen again. I had actually wrote this post out yesterday in notepad. Just as I finished, I went to copy and paste this to gbfans but what I did instead was highlighted the text and then deleted it on accident. It took me two hours to write too! Before I even sat down again the next day for a rewrite, I had to ask myself why was I even doing this now after all that time had passed? Well, short answer is that I have seen a few excellent ECU builds on here and the work has been very inspiring that I felt like I should.

These days a lot of us aren't as enthusiastic as we used to be with the fandom. Sad to say but it's true. Stuff sometimes happens that's completely out of your control where it knocks the wind out of your sails and dampens any or all enjoyment that you took from it. That most certainly happened with our group Southland. There were a few times where we had thought about hanging it up and calling it a day. Everything has an expiration date after all? However, when you've dedicated yourself to something that you love for so long and you're wholly ready to give your goodbye, it somehow gains this weird ability by finding a new way to rekindle that spark again. I guess seeing these other fantastic builds on here and how they turned out is one thing. Then to read how our thread helped others in some way has shown us that we were doing something right. I think that's the answer to everything. Anyways, the build must go on.

The last thing we did with the project was we bought a new panel box. I believe we mentioned finding more to a reference photo that showed us what we had was inaccurate. Anyways, with the new box in hand, we were ready to start the process of connecting the conduit cable housing to the box. The reference always looked to us like the connections were crudely done using a bent piece of aluminum. Since accuracy is our main goal that's how we were going to approach it.

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Then we had to figure out the precise placement which was easier said than done. You have to temporarily mock up the placement, hold the conduit in place and then compare every angle to the reference.

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Now that we were happy with where the brackets were going to go, we had to figure out how we were going to attach everything? You can look at it and say "I'll just do it this way". However, when you're striving for accuracy you gotta ask "How did they attach all of this stuff?", meaning the original prop builders. What we decided on doing was riveting the pieces to the panel box. Then screwing a wooden dowel to the brackets and connecting the conduit over the dowels. We figured this is how it had to have been done?

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Then before you do any drilling or make any permanent changes, you really should look everything over one last time to make sure its going to be done right. Measure twice/cut once.

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This is where we hit a snafu. I don't remember well on how it went down but something just wasn't adding up right. Something just didn't feel right like something was off with the reference and we couldn't immediately figure it out. We halted ourselves from going any further before we could figure things out. We needed to pour over the reference yet again. This is when we noticed something interesting. A few images leaked of the ECU from Afterlife much earlier that we hadn't really taken a deeper look at. Particularly this image here:

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At the time we were quick to notice what Sony got right about the prop and also what they got wrong. Stuff like the wrong handle, push buttons, piano hinge, etc. Onlyalad19 asked 'what about those odd triangular pieces on their panel box?'

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That's when it dawned on us that Sony/Ghost Corps must've found something in their archives that revealed more details about the prop. This had us going back over through screenshots from the film to see if we could spot these details. It just so happens that there is only one scene where you can make out these triangular details. In the film, just after the ConEd guy shuts off the power grid and realizes it was a huge mistake, the scene where we see the red light of the unit blinking is where this detail resides. The picture itself was dark, but after brightening it up with software, we could see it clear as day.

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We figured two things either needed to happen at that point. First, we could try and reach out to Sony/Ghost Corps and request access to view a few key pieces of reference they have or we could try and locate these things ourselves? We ended up doing both. Unfortunately, Ghost Corps couldn't help us much for obvious reasons since Afterlife wasn't in the books during that time. The only thing we really learned is that the door doesn't open at all on their ECU prop (then I got to see it later in person but only from a distance). Since that didn't pan out it was up to us to spend to what was probably going to be more countless hours trying to find yet another unidentified part (which I have grown to loathe). Luckily it didn't take too long to figure out what they actually were and Onlyalad19 made that discovery. He was the one who questioned the reference and the brackets. Nobody would've noticed those details otherwise.

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This is a picture from the auction Onlyalad19 bought off eBay. This was actually just slightly before that really cool time when the bumper label was discovered. Another key piece of ECU accuracy that had long been missing. The only thing missing from the prop now is what the white label actually says underneath the handle. One of my main jobs for this project is the thread updates and labels (Onlyalad19 does most of the fabrication and ZuulTheGatekeeper helps with the odd jobs and assists). I have a better idea of what that particular label says now, but I will not be getting into that. I mentioned this once before but it's not cool how some jerk is out there making profit off of our hard work, so best to leave those new details out. Besides, we don't want any of you wasting your money on inaccurate and overpriced inkjet prints on sticker paper anyways. Haha, just putting that out there.

These conduit fitting/connectors arrived and they were great but one of the sizes was wrong. We got two of each in different sizes but we were basing our measurements on the outer diameter and not the inner diameter of the conduit. So one size was a quarter of an inch too big. Easy fix though and after a week or so we had the right pieces in hand.

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Everything looks great and that would just about be it except for the last detail of how we were going to connect this to our faux wall? Looking at the reference we realized we made the height of the wall based on the top of the old panel box we picked out. With the new box, it had to be mounted higher up on the wall where there is no wall. Well, that too is an easy fix. We always wanted it to hang it off of the top of the wall anyways so all we need to do is mount the bracket in the proper place and call it a day.

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We haven't connected the bracket to the panel box just yet. We need to find a time to pull everything out and figure out that placement exactly. That will be our next thing we do, but the hard part is coming up which is to figure out the inner trap housing mechanism. This is something we need a miracle to figure out and also a big reason why this project has stalled. Hopefully we'll get to that soon enough. If anyone has any suggestions or insight, please reach out. The panel box sure does look great though? lol

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I mentioned at the beginning of this post some of the woes we've experienced and how it's salted our wounds over the last year. I left most of that out when I originally wrote the post. Since it starts off on kind of a downer, let me take a moment to briefly go over some of the stuff Southland had been working on in the time being. Let's end things on a cheerful high note?

First, I took on a personal project for a dear friend of mine. He has a son that's autistic that will occasionally get himself into stuff he doesn't realize is wrong. Here is one such instance were he completely thrashed a brand new Cobra helmet from G.I. Joe that his dad had just bought a few weeks prior. We don't even know how he did the damage. Anyways, his son doesn't know any better so I felt bad and offered to fix the helmet for him. There was lots of sanding that went into getting the desired result. Whoever the prop maker was rushed the job. It was lumpy and uneven in a lot of places so that all had to be fixed. I'm keeping this short so I am sparing the details. Left to right is before and after.

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Second, this was a project that was a long time coming. I won't really get into the details of why this was important for us to do, but this was something we wanted to do for a former member of the group. Basically to right a wrong that had gone on far too long. The gist is the pack needed some TLC but we took it all the way with a full restoration. The pack was in very bad shape but we wanted to breathe new life into it. Left to right is before and after:

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Finally, the biggest project that any of our members has undertaken and has consistently blown us away with his accomplishments; The Ecto-1!

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The work that has been done on this vehicle is truly amazing! Every single piece of that car has been either restored or replaced. From a rust bucket in 2017 to a beast of the road in 2022, watching the progress come together every day has been an absolute joy and a pleasure to have had a small hand in the process. We can't gush about it enough. A feat this big is not something we recommend anyone get themselves into. It is no easy feat and there are lots of setbacks but our member Mike made it look easy. We had even talked about doing a very detailed thread here on gbfans at one point, but there are thousands of build photos to go through that everyone would probably be better off if a book were to written about it. A book that would rival the thickness of 'War and Peace'! hahaha. There still lots of work to be done on it, primarily the interior, but he continues to amaze us every step of the way. It purrs just as loud as it shines!

Well, this is what we've done and where we're at. With a new year beginning, we don't know what each day will bring us but we're going to be optimistic about it. As I wrap this up, I realize that this is just a small reminder of what our group has accomplished over the last year or so. From almost disappearing completely to slowly regrouping and being reinvigorated. It's been a long, strange trip but we're not quite done yet. There's still plenty of unfinished business to take care of. I hope this post inspires anyone who reads it. Try your best but don't forget to have fun in the process.

Also, have a happy new year!
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#4976445
I've looked over every photo of Goggle builds I could find, and all the various sticker sets which have been released, and as far as I can tell nobody has put the "ERASE VARBL(S)" sticker there.

But it really does look like that's what it is, the shape of the text looks almost identical (maybe different dimensions or an alternative font, but still really close).
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By 910dohead
#4976446
This was an accidental discovery. I was looking for something else on the goggles (helping someone else with their own discovery) when it caught my eye. I've poured over several good screenshots from the film and the shape matches the one on the Containment Unit. It's a dead ringer! I also found clearer images and there's no mistaking the two. They're an identical match. Wild!
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By Spenglers
#4976895
The fact that you and your team are in the process of building not only the most accurate ECU out there, but you've gotten an Ecto-1 up to snuff is nothing short of incredible work by all involved. I can't begin to imagine the blood, sweat, tears, swearing, and everything else that's gone into every single bit of these two massive projects. I'm sure folks here would love to see photos of the car in progress if you ever decide to share even a fraction of them, just as we've enjoyed seeing your progress on the ECU!
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By 910dohead
#4977042
Oh weird, I didn't get any notification there were any replies. Thank you for the kind words on the unit.

Onlyalad19 had an epiphany regarding how the trap and the unit work with each other. We need to look into it more before we post on it. It might not pan out. I did figure out the name of the prop maker who created the containment unit for the movie. Unfortunately, this person passed away some time ago (RIP - The guy was a legend!). He has two sons, one of which works in Hollywood/prop making. I was wondering if I should try and reach out to his person to see if their father left behind some reference on the prop or at least a good story? Also, this lines up with what Richard Edlund's people told me.

Just to clarify, the Ecto-1 is owned and being worked on by our teammate Mike. Sometimes I have a hand in aiding him with details, art and try to locate parts. Besides a lot of sanding, the only thing i've assembled on his car was the Texas Instruments weather box. I made two of those (a third I have yet to put together) and the other went to Sean Bishop.

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I'll try to help Mike when he asks for my help. Otherwise, all of the hard work on his car was done with his hands. He's had help with other members of the community here on parts and reference, etc. Also, Martin Caron fabricated his lightbar brackets, which are also beautifully made. They were perfect!

Maybe i'll do a thread but that would be a lot of work and I would have to filter each post through him first. I'll run the idea past him and see what he thinks?
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By 910dohead
#4977043
Also, on the ERASE VARBLE(S) sticker on the ecto-goggles. I wouldn't have ever seen that detail for myself had Demon Vice Commander not asked me about a detail on a different label on the containment unit. Big props to him for doing that! I should also say that it appears that he noticed the sticker before I did so that discovery should belong to him. I guess I just happened to notice it around the same time.
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