Proton Pack

This is a proton pack I built back in 1984. A friend and I were lucky enough to be living in Tucson, Arizona when a museum in Scottsdale held an exhibit featuring special effects and the work of Richard Edlund. They had a rigid pack on display plus a foam stunt version. We took photos and measurements, and we each built a pack. It took about a month. This was a low budget affair so we used plywood, masonite, PVC pipe, Wite-Out caps, plastic Super-8 film cans, Pringles cans, poster board and other odds and ends we scavenged. The cyclotron was cast in fiberglass inside a roasting pan lid. No inkjet printers back then, so we peeled stickers off the back of arcade games and electrical boxes. The back plate was cut from acrylic plastic (later reinforced). My friend reproduced the Alice pack frame using aluminum pieces, a conduit bender, a rivet gun and surplus straps. I built circuitry to sequence the red lights on the cyclotron. The finished product weighed a ton. A year later I made horrible plaster molds (no knowledge or RTV back then) of some of the heavier wood components and cast fiberglass versions. Over the years I added more lights and details here and there.