#4982550
Hello everyone. First post here. I wanted to share some photos of my first pack mod in the hopes that it will help anyone who wants to modify the Spirit Full Size pack. A little back story first however. I already had the original spirit pack, and had finally saved up the money to buy the Ghostlab42 pack lights, spirit blaster, and wand lights kits. They all arrived on the 17th of April. I was beyond excited, as I was planning on getting experience with pack building using the small pack before tackling the task of doing a custom full pack in the future. Well, I'm sure you can imagine how I felt when on the very next day Spirit releases the full size pack. Thankfully I managed to go ahead and order one of the full size packs, but that left me with a problem. What to do with my smaller spirit pack electronics kits. I decided to try and modify them to fit in the full size pack as I don't have the spare funds at the moment to purchase another set of kits for a full size pack. So, below is what I found through the process.

  1. The mounting holes for the cyclotron lights are the same spacing as on the smaller pack.
  2. Things are spread further apart as one would expect (cyclotron lights, wand switch positions, etc.)
  3. Overall, mounting the smaller kit wasn't too difficult as long as you don't mind soldering and using a fair amount of hot glue.
  4. The wand required the most modification and out of the box thinking.
  5. The only function I gave up with this mod is the wand bar graph as it is soldered to the wand lights PCB and the PCB can't be mounted to the wand housing as designed. Not a flaw in the design obviously, as I'm trying to make a scaled down kit fit in a larger pack.
I didn't take as many pictures as I'd planned to, mainly because I got so focused on getting the mods done I forgot to take pictures along the way.

Stock Shell
Image

Cyclotron Lights Test Fit (Lights are not centered on cyclotron light ports)
Image

Wand disassembled and inside housing (electronics removed)
Image
Image

Wand modifications. For this I had to extend the two toggle switches and two LEDs mounted to the PCB. That way they could be mounted to the wand housing with the PCB mounted elsewhere. I made a wooden board to mount the PCB to. I glued the board in place, then used hot glue to make standoffs for the PCB to rest on to protect the through hole solder joints, and then used a zip tie to keep the PCB in place. The intent was to make this mod easily reversible so that I can install a proper full size kit in the future and install the small kit in my small pack. I also made my own reflector for the vent lights using a cut up soda can.
Image
Image
Image

Final pack internals. Compared to the wand, this part of the mod was fairly easy. I again used an aluminum can for the N-Filter vent lights. The bar graph is fairly easay to mount without modifying the spirit pack itself. I used the included 3d printed brackets, and used hot glue to hold it in place. Make sure you hold it in place by hand when doing this, so that you can ensure the bar graph is centered to the blue lense. The sound board fit without any modifications to the pack shell, and I just used a lot of hot glue to hold it in place. For the volume control, I drilled a hole into the ion arm housing, removed the resistor, enlarged the existing hole, and mounting the potentiometer in place. I then hollowed out the resistor insides, and affixed it to the potentiometer knob using hot glue. To solve for cyclotron light bleed and alignment issues, I used the ghostlab kit included diffusers on top of the stock diffusers, and then made my own reflectors out of cardboard. This works surprisingly well.
Image

Well, that about covers everything I did for my first pack mod. If anyone has any questions I'll be happy to answer/help. I'd also like to state how thankful I am that this forum exists. A lot of the ideas I got for this build came from looking at other peoples packs. Such as using soda cans for diffusers. Never would've thought of that on my own honestly.
jonogunn, gamera1968, kman liked this
#4982703
I'm not sure to be honest. I'm sure it could be done, but one issue that would present itself is in how the wand is screwed together. Like the smaller pack, the wand tip is held in place using a molded stud of the wand housing. This could be cut out to make room for and extension mechanism, but then the problem of keeping the wand pieces together would need to be solved as the stud is also used for one of the housing screws. That was a long way of saying I think so, but it will require quite a bit of garage engineering to make happen.

    Hey and welcome

    My Little Pony/Ghostbusters crossover done by my d[…]

    Great work identifying the RS Temperature Control […]

    I read Back in Town #1. Spoilers : Hate to b[…]