finish

Ghostbusters Project: Finalising the Booster

To continue where I left off yesterday, I continued the work on the Booster on my Ghostbusters Proton pack.

I took the raw 3d print, sanded off the biggest irregularities and then covered it heavily in spray filler. Once cured, it was time to sand it off again…

Two rounds of spray filler and sanding off until it was smooth, then time to start painting. The key to paint with spray colours is to build it up in thin layers and let them dry in between.

Once the paint was dry enough (it also dries a LOT faster when you apply it in small layers), it was time to clear coat the booster.

Once dry, it was time to mount on the proton pack. The mounting was done fairly easily and quickly. In reality, I should do a weld line around the booster, but as I am planning to replace this (possibly) with an aluminium tube at some point, I have opted to not do this just yet. We’ll see. If so I have the weld line to build up with epoxy resin, and also to do the “ugly weld” between the booster and the Ion arm.

So far, so good.

One of my pet peeves when it comes to 3d printing is that many people unfortunately do not put in the effort of making their prints smooth. Some people wishes to keep the 3d print lines as a statement, which is fine, but many prop makers don’t use the tool to its full potential: which in my world means to use the 3d printer to save time when building the core item, and the time saved in construction can be put into finishing instead. If used like this, and you use smart methods when doing the finish, you will save time overall and still have a prop that looks great!

Last piece to do on the outside of the pack: paint the motherboard, do the ugly weld and (possibly) the weld around the booster tube, then time for the dressing of the pack, adding labels, routing all the little cables and stuff that makes it look great.

There is still a LOT to be done on the inside of the pack, not to mention the thrower that I’ve barely started with. My plan for the thrower is to 3d print mounting panels to be placed on the inside of the thrower to hold the electronics in place.

By |2017-06-09T16:12:23+02:00June 9th, 2017|Building, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters Proton Pack|Comments Off on Ghostbusters Project: Finalising the Booster

Ghostbusters Project: Building a Booster

One of the few items I have left on my pack is the booster tube.
I sourced a few nearby stores for fitting tubes in PVC, but found none that were even near the proper diameter, so I decided to make my own. Let’s get that 3D printer to work!

Now, the print went over night and when I started it last night, I was tired and used the wrong settings, so it is all spotty and blobby, but the new one above is straight off the printer with no sanding using the correct settings!.

Here are all the parts:

The booster plug just fits inside the outermost part of the booster tube, and is fastened from the inside with an m3 bolt.

All parts of the tube are designed to be screwed together to help when gluing them. I use these brass inserts that I just head press into the plastic and i just love them!

They are simply pressed into the plastic with my soldering iron, so they are melted in place.

All three parts fit together, and all holes are already made into the design.

Apart from the annoying spots, this looks pretty ok!

Here is the new booster tube, printing as I write this, and will keep on printing for another 10 hours or so. It looks much better when printed with the correct settings!

Finally a few shots of the pack with all now painted and fastened parts, apart from the booster tube and frame, which are the last parts to be mounted on the pack.

By |2017-06-08T23:23:56+02:00June 8th, 2017|Building, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters Proton Pack|Comments Off on Ghostbusters Project: Building a Booster

Ghostbusters Project: The first money shot

A couple of minor updates within the last few days, that in itself were not big enough to warrant a blog post, but now..

First off, I took the daring step of drilling hole in my shell for the split loom. I had previously 3d printed a loom holder, and it was time to jump off the cliff..

I marked off where the loom would pass through the shell, and step drilled the hole up to 30mm, which was the diameter of my holder, then used my dremel to cut down from the half circle to the bottom of the shell.

A little sanding and filing, and it turned out pretty good.

Can’t wait for my proper motherboard to arrive so I can start mounting things. I did have to bondo and sand and repaint a bit around the hole, but that was fixed as well as the bondoed piece on the right.

In addition to this, I got a new shipment of fun pieces. Not all of these are accurate, but to my defense, I ordered some of these prior to finding the proper ones.

Having almost all pieces in place, I decided it was time for my first pic with placement of most parts.

I still intend to replace most resin parts with aluminium, but until I have them, the resin parts will do.

It was about here I found how wonky some parts of the shell is. The upper left corner where the ion arm is supposed to sit had a height difference of 3 mm from the corner to the inner corner of the ion arm placement. I had to balance the resin ion arm (that I had sanded flat) on an m3 nut on the inner corner for it to not fall down.

To fix this, I decided to mask off parts of that shell, sand down the highest points and add loctite putty to build up a base. It took me about 45 minutes to fix, but the result was pretty good.

You can clearly see the bulk that was build up. Dry fitting with the ion arm leaves this:

Nice and flat!

The shell went out on the balcony for a bit of touch up on the hammerite black paint, and once that’s dry, most of the shell work should be done.

I also hot glued in my coloured lenses for the power bar and the cyclotron…

… only to realize that I have RGB LED’s in my light pack, and the program does four different colours, so I had to cut them off. Oh well 🙂

I also took out the metal parts and the black glossy plastic box of my 3d printed ghost trap, courtesy of countspatula and went over them with flat black before assembling again.

I have built in a remote control in my pedal to not have to use the hose for anything functional at all, and I decided to also wire up the LED on the remote to a small LED on the pedal. It is not very bright, but a nice little addition, I think.

 

By |2017-04-14T16:53:59+02:00April 14th, 2017|Building, Costuming, Ghostbusters Proton Pack, Stormtrooper|Comments Off on Ghostbusters Project: The first money shot
Go to Top