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Hi everyone

...it´s been a while since i made something Ghostbusters related but since i´ve sold my old pack i sorta knew i´m going to make another one some day. Its fun to make these things and i feel like i can do it better than last time. Sure the old one wasnt that bad but it had its inaccuracies ^^
So i´ve been collecting parts all the time before i was actually going to start working on it and now that i have most of the stuff i need it´s time to start something.

Styrene is the material of choice again (of course ) because i really like to work with it and its pretty easy to get straight angles and lines. But the ultimate goal for this built is making a fiberglass shell, so what im making now is just the master or buck or whatever you want to call it.

Anyway...i know you guys want to see pics so here we go with a little parts shot for the beginning:

Lots of goodies from jpa35, masteryoda, AJ, irricanian and some radio shop in nyc

Now on to the actual construction. This time i made the crank generator first to get that damn thing out of the way. I think its the hardest piece of the whole upper part of the pack. Here it is in its raw shape already together with the gun mount box:

Looks a bit dirty because i touched it with glue on my hands ^^ Oh and the grey part is just some pvc pipe cut to the correct length.

This looks better i guess:

I added almost all of the ribs and sanded the corners and edges. And as you can clearly see ive also included some details that arent in the plans. the bottom strip being one piece is a good example. I made the grooves with a very small round file just like hooker did it in his really great build thread. Also....I´ll be keeping some of the flaws on this intentionally, like the seam between the strip and the gearbox body and also one of the sections on it being smaller than the others. Maybe its not as small as it is on the screenused ones but i still wanted to add this little detail.

Another shot of the gearbox and gunmount:

I rounded all the edges and corners a lot more than last time to match the original a bit better. Still missing the corner plate but you can already see some of the eda box which i made yesterday.

Pretty much everything i have done so far:

The grey stuff on the eda box is some pvc pipe again, but i had to heat it up and bend it a little to get it to the correct diameter. Gotta make sure the pdd likes it in his spot

I also wanted to include another detail thats not in the plans:


And this is what all the boxes look like from the inside:

I´ve always added some styrene strips in the corners for some extra support and also some L-shaped profiles on the outer walls of some boxes.

Now something completely different:

I´ve soldered this together from aluminium already two months ago. Turned out suprisingly well...especially in comparison to the aluminium gun i tried to make. It wasnt a complete failure but some measurements were off. Anyway...there´s no need to worry about the gun anymore because Cpu64 makes one for me

So that´s it for now, hope you ghostheads are going to like this thread.
More to come.........really soon.

damn good lookin scratch build you have going on so far

Hell yes! This will be a top notch scratch building thread. Great work as usual Bigi.

great job on the crank gen! I love those curves

This already looks incredible. Keep us posted!

Awesome job so far. This exactly how I built my mat-board packs on the inside..

Is that instrument bar a solid piece of aluminum? Sure looks like it. And if so, might be hard adding lights.. No?
I have extra ones I can add to the gun if you want.

Damn that is brilliant. What are you using for filler?

Wow, beautiful work, I can see a very nice pack in the making here

Thanks for the nice comments

CPU64 wrote:Is that instrument bar a solid piece of aluminum? Sure looks like it. And if so, might be hard adding lights.. No?
I have extra ones I can add to the gun if you want.

Only the piece it was resting on is solid, the actual trigger box and the instrument bar are made from square tube. So i´m going to keep this one, that way i can say that at least something of the gun is selfmade

I took a pic of the bottom of the trigger box so you can see the access panel i added there:

ThrowingChicken wrote:What are you using for filler?

Its a polyester filler for yachts and boats and its similar to bondo i think. The can said its white and contains up to 20% styrene so i wanted to try this one instead of the red autobody filler i usually use. I hope this one little can i got is going to be enough for the whole pack, im trying to use as little as possible.

I need to continue working on the powercell ribs now, so there will be an update within the next couple of days i hope.

YES!! Bigi I loved your last pack build thread and am very excited about following this one too!! Fantastic work so far

Thanks a lot Nick

I got a lot of things done this weekend...actually pretty much everything of the upper part of the pack like putting all the boxes together and filling and rounding seams between them.

...and then i started the corner plate:

Straightforward construction, i just bend a styrene strip and glued it to the already cut out shape of the plate. Then I glued a smaller plate on top of it and filled and sanded the angled part between these. I hope this description makes sense, lol...I forgot to take a picture of it. But if you wanna see how it´s done look at hookers styrene pack thread

So this is what the finished corner plate looks like:



Next thing on the to do list was the discs for the EDA-Box:

I used my dremel tool to give them a slightly concave shape while leaving the little nipples in the middle of them. So actually I didnt have to use any filler at all on them. Im not sure if this shape is 100% accurate, but it should be close to the real ones...umm...if my eyes didnt trick me while i was staring at reference pics.

Here they are on the EDA-Box:


Also added the missing fins on the left side of the crankbox:

I filled the seam between the crank generator and the EDA-Box before doing this to get a clean look. Then I just rounded the part of the fins which are touching the seam and simply glued them in place. There are still some imperfections in the seams but eventually ill take care of this.

Another pic of that:

As you can see theres the little shelf on top of the powercell too.

Speaking of the powercell...i also did something else to it:

The bottom is tapered to allow the fins to be tapered too while the top fin is at a staight 90° angle.

Its starting to look like something:

I´ve never thought i could do this so quickly, lol. Im for sure not in a hurry with this pack but i had a lot of spare time the last two weeks. And doing nothing but plannnig everything and buying parts over the last few months REALLY made me want to start working on it

The next step will be assembling this thing:


More pictures coming soon

Beautiful. You, sir, are an artist.

Smooth, clean and beautiful. Sooooo nice.

Awesome Bigi glad to see you back, your previous scratchbuild was one of the best scratchbuilds ever hands down and all around one of the best packs ever, definitely in my top three . What you have so far is nothing short of amazing, glad to see your going the extra accurate route with the powercell fins, this looks like it's turning out to be my favorite pack ever. Looking forward to more of your updates buddy.

Absolutely amazing.

The way you are able to blend the plastic is phenomenal!

Thanks for the kind words, i really appreciate it

Last time you have already seen the bottom and top plate of the spacer........and this is how it came together:

Self explaining picture i think

I choose to make a bottom and a top plate to add some strength to the whole thing, mostly because i knew i will have to sand it a lot...especially on the cyclotron. And here you can see why i have a big hole in the middle of the top of the spacer:

Its because it makes adding the cyclotron a lot easier Its one piece of styrene which pushes against the spacer.
The seam of the bend styrene strip of the cyclotron is where the N-filter will be later so it doesnt really matter that the cyclotron is not perfectly round there.

A shot of the inside with lots of little styrene pieces everywhere for reinforcement:



As you can see the top part is only a very rough shape. I didnt bother making this 100% smooth because the edge will be rounded later anyway:

Its made of two rings and two solid styrene sheets to give it some strength and also to make me able to sand the edge a lot without sanding right thru it and leaving a hole. There are also the little square pieces already glued in place which will come in handy when adding the rim around the cyclotron.

Bending the styrene strip for the rim:

I just left it like this for ten minutes.

And now glued in place:

Its starting to resemble the lower part of the pack

Now on to the N-filter. I glued two pvc couplers together for this one:


After some sanding it turned out to be very nice and seamless, im happy with it:


Here im dremeling the cutout for the N-filter:

A little action shot, lol

I used quite a lot of filler to get a nice and smooth rounded cyclotron:


And now some pics of whole thing after about 10000 hours of sanding and glueing everything together:






I still need to add all the cosmetic plating and make the center cover but im glad that most of the lower part of the pack is done now.

More progress coming soon.

My mind has been blown! This is phenomenal work.

Wow thats godly, you do amazing work with styrene and plastic, kudos!Cant wait to see more

wow great work! i am building mine in a very similar way, using ABS sheet instead of styrene.

You're a natural... yours is a level of craftmanship that's been missing for too long from this forum.

Nothing else I can say would do it justice.

That is simply amazing work. Keep it up!

Nucking Futs ! Awesome awesome job sir

Thanks a lot for the compliments, thats music to my ears

Alright, last time i had the upper and lower sections of the pack almost finished so what had to come next for me was joining these two big parts by making the center cover.

So i cut one piece of styrene to the correct shape and test fitted it first:


Then i cut it up into three sections to get the different heights, cut out some wall pieces too, glued it together and ended up with this:



Next i had to glue it either to the upper or the lover part but i choose the lower part. To make the whole thing look like one piece and get rounded corners i just did what i always do if rounded corners are needed. Basically i smear filler into the corner and pull a screw or another round part along the corner. Then when the filler is halfways cured its pretty easy to cut of the excess:


A seam done with method should like this (or better) even without any sanding:


Of course it will look better with some sanding tho:

As you can clearly see the cosmetic plating on the spacer was already glued in place too when i took these pics.

Here im test fitting the whole thing to the upper section:

Looks like a tight fit

After taking care of the corners and some sanding it looked like this:



And that´s it...im done




Ok, the fake weld on the N-filter is not there in these pictures but i didnt forget about it. Right now the first paint is already drying on the master and i´ll have some pictures of the painted thing up soon.

Oh..another thing i wanted to mention...does anyone have any ideas or suggestions about what i can do to make it better / more accurate ? Please let me know, im not afraid of ripping pieces off and redo them ^^ Actually i already did that a couple of times, lol

More to come really soon again.

jesus thats beautiful

my only suggestion is since you seem to like adding the small curves and drafts that are evident on the pack, there is also an upward slope between the gunmount block and the crank gen, right where the HGA goes. other than that, this pack is pure Sex

you can see it here on the planet hollywood Minnesota pack.

No words. They should've sent a poet.

I'm harder than a diamond right now.

Great, thanks for the input kind
I was hoping to get some info like this from you since i know youre paying a lot of attention to detail. Consider it changed and done, hehe

That is one beautiful Proton Pack.

Man you are rocking out this pack in record time. Quality didn't suffer a bit. Awesome.

Wow, that looks like a masterpiece. I wish my build would look like this, but I don't have your talent...or the right tools.

Btw. from which part of germany do you come from?