[OnEdge]

Hello everyone! Long time lurker here, I know the forum isn’t as active these days, but I still wanted to document my progress like everyone else that has come before me as I scratch build a proton pack .

This is my seventh proton pack I have ever attempted. I say attempted because most of those attempts were never completed and were either destroyed or trashed. I’m not actually sure if this one will ever get finished either since I’m still a teenager, but hopefully documenting it will motivate me more.

For this build I want to see if I can match the semi hero in terms of its looks. In terms of accuracy, I want to try my best to be as accurate as I can while still being idealized in a few areas. I’m basing a lot of these measurements off of the GBFans new pack plans as well as other nuances that other builders have discovered like Chris Bosh. I used to not like the wonkiness of the real hero packs that much, but as I have researched and studied the hero packs more, I LOVE the wonkiness! I feel that it adds a lot of character to the heros, if it was perfect, it wouldn’t feel right. Its ironic too because I’m a huge perfectionist irl haha.

Before we start, heres a brief history of my old packs. (V4-6)




This pack is the only one that I still have, the rest were trashed which I heavily regret.


Ok lets start with the power cell first. I actually built a few parts before I thought of documenting this, so I’ll share a few pictures and just explain from there.

This is the front window of the power cell. Theres actually a small dent near the second rib and I was going to redo the window, but I decided to keep in the imperfection.



Heres the side of the power cell. I’m using this PVC 3mm foam that I found for the ribs. 2mm foam didn’t look right, and I didn’t want to use the foam core I was using to build the body because thats what I did for my fifth and sixth proton pack and it doesn’t look great. I also tried my best to get the angles of the ribs to spec like they are on the heros. I’m not sure if I want to attempt a faux wood grain just yet, but we’ll see.



Heres where the injectors will sit. You can see I angled the side of the power cell and I also angled it where the injectors will sit. This means I have to put a spacer plate to make the injectors sit straight just like the hero packs.



Overall I’m pretty happy with how the power cell came out! The one thing I’m concerned about is how I might go about rounding the edges of the ribs and the entire box in general. I don’t want to take sand paper to it because I’m scared its going to scuff up and ruin the paper of the foam. If this was a styrene build it would be a lot easier.



As a bonus, I actually built another power cell which is very idealized before I began to like the look of the imperfections and angles.




Lets start the gun mount now.

This is a good general overview of how the gun mount looks without the ribs. I tried my best to get all the angles in the gun mount unlike my previous versions, but I’m worried because the real gun mount is heavily rounded and I’m not sure how I could potentially achieve that with the material I’m working with. If anyone has any suggestions, please tell me! Another thing I’m worried about is whether the gun mount will be able to support the weight of the v-hook and wand, it would be really bad if the wand fell and broke parts off. The wand I’m going to use is an 84 hasbro wand as a temporary solution since I don’t like scratch building a wand. One day though, I will try my hand at a scratch built wand .



Believe it or not, the ribs on this took me an hour or so. Anyways, the gun mount is done and I’m happy with most of it. Unfortunately the problem of it not rounded is showcased best here as its so boxy compared to the real gun mount.



The next part that I will start is the gearbox. I will keep you guys posted when I get around to it

[alphabeta001]

Loving your build. All praise the wonkiness

Have you considered cutting the corners off of the foam board with a very sharp blade and a high grit sandpaper, 600 to 800, to gently round down the foamcore? You could then apply milliput and when that hardens sand it some more.

Lordgilpin made a foamcore pack in 2009 that goes through some of this- http://www.gbfans.com/community/viewtop ... =2&t=13685

[OnEdge]

Glad to hear you like the progress so far! Thats actually a very good idea I haven’t even thought of that. I was also wondering whether or not a sanding sponge would be useful too. I also took a look at the thread and wow. I can’t believe I never found that thread earlier! If my pack turns out successful then I seriously owe it to this site so thanks

[alphabeta001]

Just curious if you have any further progress?

[OnEdge]

Not too much, been rather busy and the crank gen has been way more difficult than my last ones I built! Hopefully as soon as I have updates I will keep you posted

[OnEdge]

Hey guys, its been over a month without updates and I apologize. School has gotten in the way of a lot of things and working with foam core is a lot more difficult than one would expect. A fellow user on the boards here who also did a foam build put it like “foam is an easy material, but its not an easy material to work with”. The progress isn’t the most impressive but I thought an update is better than no update.

I’ve been trying to chip away at this crank gen for a while now. I’m planning on splitting the part into three pieces so I can make the box where the crank knob sits, wonky.



Here is the first box I managed to make. This box is where the label sits. The small pile of panels next to it is the middle box where the vacuum pump will sit. I made a pretty big mistake with the top panel on the box I made, you can clearly see in the image how the paper has folded and warped. I’m deciding on whether I fix it or not since it adds to the pack’s imperfection spirit.

I’m contemplating on whether or not I should continue to update this thread after I finish the shell because I don’t plan on making the rest of the parts from scratch since this may be the last build I do for a while. Thats it for the updates though.

[OnEdge]

Hey everyone got more updates. This one may be a long one as we have good news and bad news.

I’ll start with the bad news. The bad news is that I’ve had to redo a lot of my work I did previously on the crank gen due to incorrect measurements, bad warps/seamlines, it not sitting flush, etc etc… Its been a mess and getting the part to the point it is right now has been difficult.

After I made my last update, I made the center part where the vacuum pump sits. I wanted to glue the new part to the part I made last, but I realized the old part did not sit flush and the paper warp continued to bother me. I wanted to at least fix the paper warp by redoing the panel and this is where things began to go downhill. After a lot of attempts, it ended being worse than when I started.

I tried to ignore it and glue the center part to it, but the seamline that came from it since it did not sit flush wasn’t pretty. I also realized I made a mistake with the center piece measurement. It was too long by 1/16 of an inch, so if I put the vacuum pump in, there may be too much slack.



At this point, I wasn’t happy with how the part turned out and I decided to move onto the top part where the crank knob sits while I think over the situation with the bottom parts.



Lucky for me the top part turned out good and has all the angles to spec.
When that was done, I made up my mind to redo the bottom portion to be one piece so that we can avoid the seamline, fix the part being flush, but most importantly redo the measurements.




When I cut these two pieces out, I was super happy with them and I thought I nailed the measurements, but when I double checked them, I realized I got another thing wrong.



In this picture its 2.5 inches long, but I completely forgot that removing 1/16 of an inch from the center piece meant that I had to add 1/16 to this area. Honestly I could’ve just glossed over this and it would’ve been fine, but since this pack was going to be one of my final packs, I wanted it to be as good as I could make it to be so I recut those pieces.



Now we can move onto the good news. I cut the rest of the pieces, then it flew together quickly. I still need to attach the panel for the middle, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. (hopefully lol)
It was good that I redid the part because it looks a lot cleaner, it sits flush, and best of all, the measurements are now acceptable!



A good overview of the old part (on the bottom) and the new part (on the top).
When this was mostly done, I could finally test fit the bottom part and the top parts together.



Here is the front face of the crank gen



Here is the side of the crank gen, you can see I made the top part taller by 1/8 of an inch then the bottom part like they are on the heros.




A nice general overview of the crank gen and a comparison between old and new. I know the progress isn’t too impressive, but nonetheless I’m happy with the new crank gen so far and there shouldn’t be too much that stands in the way of completing it.

While I was battling the crank gen, I did a few other things.



I wanted to experiment with the corners and I lightly rounded them on the gun mount with some sand paper. I might be able to round it further but I don’t think I can do what lordgilpin did in his foam core build to round the box because I’m too scared lol.



I also added my old scratch built bumper from lost wax onto my old proton pack just for fun. It doesn’t look too bad. One of my main reasons for doing this new build and not finishing my old pack, was because I discovered that every measurement on it was wrong and it was too idealized. Despite that, it still looks so cool and gives me motivation to finish this new pack every time I look at it. I may have some plans for this pack in the future

Thats it for the updates, I might take a break after the crank gen is completed since the EDA assembly will be another battle on its own, but thanks for reading! (One more thing, don’t be a perfectionist like me because you don’t want to experience the troubles I went through with this haha)

[pchrisbosh1]

Nice work sir! You should be proud, there are very few people who can say they built a scratchbuilt proton pack and your one of them.

[OnEdge]

Wow. It’s an honor for you to comment on my post, your scratch build has been a major inspiration for me and many others. Thanks so much Chris!

[alphabeta001]

This build is looking great. Don't knock your skills.

[OnEdge]

Thanks, man I greatly appreciate it!

[OnEdge]

Hey everyone, its been a while since my last post so I thought I should update you guys. Life got in the way but now that I have more time, I can start working on the pack again and hopefully complete it some day.

Shortly after my last post, fellow user pchrisbosh1 pmed me about my build and graciously gave me his 3D files of his legendary scratch build for me to reference measurements from. I’m so grateful for his kindness as its helped with my build tremendously! Seriously thanks man!

After checking my current parts to Chris’s version, I was off in a few places so I deliberately chose to restart from scratch. Its not so bad because I have more time and can complete parts way faster than I used to.

Without further ado, heres the new power cell!





Here is the new power cell next to its older sisters. I would not blame anyone if they thought I went crazy since it looks the exact same hah. (from left to right oldest to most recent)


You may be wondering as to why the ribs are not present on the power cell. With a new opportunity to redo most of my parts I took a look at my old power cell ribs and it always bugged me. The thickness of the ribs on my old power cell were close enough for the time, but I always knew that they were not the correct thickness. In Chris Bosh’s scratch build, he discovered the ribs were closer to around .150 inches compared to the .125 inches that most people used. My ribs were not even .125 inches. They were a little less than that. I’m trying to see if I can get some material that is closer to the correct thickness so thats why my power cell looks a bit bare.

I’m also thinking about the new gun mount and crank gen. On my old versions, they were just built as boxes with the corners lightly rounded. On the real shell the rounding on those parts were significant. I had a very ambitious plan of using bondo and a lot of sanding to achieve that. Instead of doing my normal technique of joining foam together, I would do something like what I did in the image below and then use the channel created to put bondo in and sand. Very similar to lordgilpin’s build. It could work, but sanding is not fun and theres not many places in my house where I can do it. What do you guys think?



The current foam core I’m working with is not the highest quality so thats why you may spot paper warpage, but I’ve sort of grown to accept it more now haha. I might be pushing the limits of what I can do with foam core too much but its definitely a fun journey! Thats it for the updates, thanks for reading everyone.

[OnEdge]

Hey everyone got a quick update for today. Last time I made parts in the order of the power cell, gun mount, and then crank gen. This time I wanted to just get the crank gen out of the way since it caused a lot of problems before. In my last post I was debating on using a different method to join my foam together which would create channels to put some bondo in to get the rounded edges. I gave it some more thought, and I decided bondo would be too messy to work with and sand since theres not many areas of my house I can do it in. I still wanted to do something different then my last crank gen so I used my previous versions to make mockups.

This is the crank gen I built previously. You can see I stuck an empty toilet roll onto it to act as the vacuum pump since I don’t have pvc pipe on me. I made some pencil marks to indicate how the new version should be cut. If this was styrene, those pencil marks would be where I would sand. Sanding this as if it were styrene would not work so I have to cut those out and build it into the new version. This obviously makes the geometry of the part much harder then the previous version but I believe I can make it work to where it would resemble the hero crank gen more. (Also if you’re wondering why the crank gen looks worse then you last saw it, it’s because something fell on it)




The second mockup is on the crank gen that was part of my original pack build from a year ago. I decided I wanted to rip out all the parts and separate them just so we can have a nice comparison. This mock up was just to see if it was worth going through all the trouble to build this new crank gen with all the new complex geometry. Looking at this mock up, somehow it just looks off. To most people it might look good, but for me it just looks eh. It just looks too boxy to me and not like the screen used at all.




That’s all the updates today people. I know it’s not too much, but hopefully I can get started on building the new crank gen tomorrow. Thanks for reading everyone!

[alphabeta001]

Brilliant work so far. Can't wait to see what else you do.

[OnEdge]

Update Time!

Hey everyone! Its been a few months, but its finally time again for an update. I decided to wait before doing an update this time since I realized my last few posts have been a bit lackluster. A lot has happened this past summer, namely with my old pack I mentioned here and there. I’m going to split this update into three posts, one for the build of my old pack, one for the lessons learned from it, and one for my new pack to try and avoid muddying up everything, although I apologize in advance if this post is super messy.

For context, one year ago, I was in a rush to build a proton pack in less than a month to go to Fan Expo with it. I couldn’t finish it in the end, but Fan Expo was still just as fun without it. This year I wasn’t sure if I was going to go to Fan Expo but at the last minute my friends and I decided to go. This left me with the possibility of finishing my old pack again, so for a week, I devoted my time to try and finish it into a state that was good enough. I didn’t really care all that much while constructing it, so a lot of the techniques I used were shoddy at best. The experience of building it taught me a lot of lessons. Theres a few notable ones to take into account that I will get into but for now I’ll share some progress pictures of it.

Heres the pack before I started.




A lot of the old parts were too damaged to use, so I substituted them with my scrap parts from the new version.





Heres the pipes I cut from pvc.




For the booster frame, I was going to be lazy and just cut the general shape of it, but I decided to have some fun with it and it turned out way better than I expected!
The cardboard ripple texture is not perfect, but its not bad for anyone looking to replicate it without much thought.




At this point I got lazy with the picture taking. I textured it with homax wall spray, painted it with black semi gloss, and glued everything on with hot glue, including the pipes, brass fittings from home depot, tubes, and the light kit I got from ebay for the pack a year ago.




I bought a 3D printed v-hook that I was going to use for this pack to connect it with my hasbro wand. I just found some random bolts to use to screw the v hook into the pack, but it didn’t work so well, so I just carelessly slathered a bunch of hot glue all over the place to further reinforce it which (somewhat) worked. I will get into this more later.




Heres a fun experiment I decided to try. Foam core is not a super stable material, a lot of other scratch builders who have used foam core have thought about using fibreglass to reinforce the inside, but its not something I have a lot of experience with. I still wanted to reinforce mine, so an idea I’ve always had was to use multiple layers of paper mache on the inside of the pack. I wasn’t sure how well it was going to work, so I tried it with two layers all throughout the pack and to my amazement, it made the pack a lot more rigid!




For the motherboard, I was too lazy to find anything actually stable enough to use, so I just used more foam core and again paper mached it. I then made some l brackets out of foam core again for the shell to bolt onto. For the alice frame, I used bolts at the bottom where the frame had holes to bolt it onto the foam core and then I ziptied it at the top.





With that, the pack was “done” for Fan Expo.




Thanks for reading this super messy post!

[OnEdge]

After Fan Expo

The pack was officially “done” for Fan Expo, you could say it now counts as the seventh proton pack I’ve ever built haha. Anyways, going to the con with the pack was an incredible feeling! The response it got from many people and from my friends was so positive. Many people loved it, but I wasn’t satisfied with the way it turned out since I knew I could do better.

In conclusion, the pack somewhat held up, but by the end, it was destroyed and damaged. Some of the problems that had occurred were expected due to my shoddy techniques I used, so this post is going to highlight the flaws and what I learned.

Heres some pictures of the current state of the pack.














Aside from the fact the pack is damaged, I never bothered to finish putting on a lot of the details due to my own laziness with this pack such as the crank knob, clippard valve, the blue and yellow hoses for the ion arm, and the resistors on the ion arm. Another point is my poor paint job. This was my first time using homax wall spray and it very clearly shows because of how inaccurate it looks. This will be something I practice and get right for the future. The semi gloss paint I used also doesn’t look that great, so I will use satin instead for the future.

What ended up happening to the pack that caused this much damage? Not much really. What really damaged it, was the fact that I was gluing all of these parts on with hot glue directly on the paint and not on the shell itself. This caused things such as the ppd and filler tube to fall off. Nearly all the red tubing fell off as well as the blue tubing connecting the injectors to the crank gen. Something else that broke off was the ion arm during Fan Expo. Luckily Fan Expo has a cosplay repair area so I just went in there and went to town with hot glue to fix it.


The missing blue hose in question. This can be easily fixed by just drilling a hole into the injectors and sync gen and gluing the tube into it.




The red “tubing” fell off because they weren’t actually the proper tubing that is supposed to be used. I didn’t have any on hand so I found some random cable that I cut up and spray painted and glued onto my fittings.




I did have a feeling that these parts would all break off so I’m not surprised. When the time comes to start finishing my new pack I’m building, I plan on bolting everything onto the shell itself instead of using a bunch of glue everywhere. This will hopefully give all the parts much more stability, but this also means I have to heavily reinforce the shell.

Another point of failure was the motherboard, again another expected failure. Because of how foam core can bend, the top of the motherboard was bulging away from the shell, so I used a bunch of random screws to fix that, but by the end of the con it failed completely. The alice frame was also on the verge of breaking off from the board, as well as the l brackets were falling apart and the holes completely worn out.






I was saving the best for last… sooo you might be noticing there is something not present on the pack, some might say the most important part of the pack. The wand. Don’t worry the wand didn’t break or anything but instead its not on there because of one thing. The v hook.




This part completely failed on me, for the most part of the con, it was somewhat surviving albeit progressively getting worse. By the end of the day it was still on the pack, but I was trying to think of all the ways that I could do to solve this problem for the new pack since I was considering using a GB1 aluminum v hook for the new pack. My original theory of how it broke off was that the hole in the foam where the bolt was, began to wear out and get loose, eventually resulting in the hook falling off.

I decided the best way to find out what had happened was to forcibly remove the hook and I was partially right. Instead of the hole wearing out, what actually happened was that the nuts I used to tighten the bolts began to loosen as there was pressure put on the hook, this resulted in the bolts getting loose meaning the only connection the hook had on the pack was just my terrible hot glue job. This could be fixed with more strength added to the shell, with a small slab of wood to act as a big washer, and tightening up the bolts. I will do some testing on this in the future.

The bolts in question.




Thats a wrap on all the problems! There might be some more I missed, but those are the severe ones that happened. I’m glad I got to build this pack because of the lessons it has given, all of these points will go towards improving my new pack .

Tommorow I will update you all on how my new pack is going, thanks for reading everyone and good luck with everything you’re doing!

In the meantime, heres a sneak peak

[OnEdge]

New pack version!

Now we’re finally back to the build thread .
The build I was originally working on was going to be a GB2 pack and the seventh version I made, but now that I completed my old pack for Fan Expo thats based off GB2, I think its time for a little change now with this new pack.




This new pack is going to be a GB1 pack build now! I’ve been bouncing on and off on whether or not I should do a GB1 build for a while now, but since I already have a GB2 pack, I don’t want to build the same thing so I thought why not go GB1 . I didn’t want to just build a regular GB1 pack too, I wanted to replicate a pack that I’ve always admired. The OMNI pack!




This was always an interesting pack to me just because of how clean it looks. Its a little funny though because the more I studied this pack, the more I realized theres a quite a few imperfections with it. mburkit’s build was also another source of inspiration for me. My pack won’t be a perfect replica of the OMNI because of the lack of reference, but lets just say it will be a tribute pack to it. I’m also not going to use the hasbro 84 wand this time for this as that will stay with my Fan Expo pack.

With that out of the way, lets get back to the updates. After making my last update on this pack, I’ve done quite a lot, but lets begin on the power cell. I realized I was slightly off on it so I adjusted it and recut/reglued a few parts so now its much better.








I then wanted to do the crank gen. In a previous post, I documented about what I was planning on doing to get the crank gen to look more like the original heroes, I originally started work on the top section and that flew together quick.




I messed up the part where it goes in by an 1/8 of an inch. It was far under 1/8 and close to 1/16 of an inch, but I didn’t mind it too much until later on I also realized I messed up the height of the entire box, so I scrapped it completely.




At that point, I decided to detour a bit and start the gun mount, which again flew together quick and this time, everything was to spec.






I then decided to turn back to the crank gen, focusing on the bottom part, then the top, making sure I didn’t mess up the part where in goes in by an 1/8 of an inch, then the middle, and then the structure of the part was done!












A comparison shot with all the crank gens.




Now it was time to do the EDA, this part wasn’t so bad to build, it was just figuring out how I should build it since I wasn’t sure if I should do it in multiple pieces or just one whole piece like how I did it on my last pack. I ultimately settled for doing it in one whole piece because another lesson learned from my last pack was that there needed to be space inside to make things more accessible such as installing the v hook, electronics, etc.









The taper was an important detail for me that I had to do. I still need to fill it in to make it look solid which will hopefully make it look better.




Theres this super lousy warp that happened on the EDA that some of you have most likely noticed already, in the lighting I took these photos in, its super obvious, whereas in other lighting conditions its not so obvious. Although I already have a bunch of warps in some of my other parts, for some reason this one bugs the hell out of me. I hope I’ll just forget about it considering the heroes themselves had a lot of warpage going on with them too.




Heres all the parts together!




The warps bug me, the lighting some of these photos were taken in highlights them even more, but thats to be expected when working with foam. I have to still do a lot of the finer details such as the ribs, vacuum pump, rounding of the parts, filling in the tapers, etc, I’ll do those all when I get the material for the ribs, but I’m still very pleased with what I managed to achieve . Hopefully I can start the sync gen some time and update this thread again, but otherwise thanks for reading everyone!

[alphabeta001]

All these builds are fantastic. I made a foam pack once and put a tenth of the effort in that you have.

Honestly very impressive work on display and I love seeing a build page again after so long

[OnEdge]

Thanks so much man! Your positive comment is super motivating for me and the project

[pchrisbosh1]

Looking great so far man! Isn't it so tedious? Sometimes it can drive you mad trying to get the details and measurements right. Your on your way sir!

[OnEdge]

Thanks Chris that means a lot! And yes it can get super tedious, I think you would know that best out of all of us haha. I’m dreading the sync gen and cyclotron since those are the most difficult parts to build imo.

[Joeyvenkman]

Wow this is looking awesome! Makes me nostalgic for the foam & cardboard packs I used to build haha. Keep up the great work!