[OnEdge]

Hey everyone! Its been a very long time since I last updated this thread, but basically I lost some steam with the project so I put it away for a while. Over the past few weeks though, I really missed having something to work on so I decided to get it back out. When I last worked on it, things changed and some of it is bad and good news. Long story short, I restarted again. Now you might be thinking “wow this guy is never gonna get this project done if he keeps restarting”, and you might be right about that, but! I have reasons for this and it’s not all bad news.

To understand what happened, we have to rewind a little bit. In October, Halloween was coming up and of course I wanted to dress up as a ghostbuster again, only there was one slight issue. My V7 Fan Expo Pack was still in very bad condition from that con. I thought I could fix it up, so I spent a day making repairs to it for Halloween and thought it was okay to be used again. On Halloween day, the whole thing fell apart! Although I made a new motherboard, my shoddy foam system completely failed, the L brackets all broke off so the whole shell and gun came crashing down to the ground. This basically totaled the pack as it made all the parts glued on fall off. I was not too surprised that that happened, but I was still a little sad. As soon as I got home, I decided to just scrap the whole thing and salvage some parts that could still be used.
After this incident, I no longer had a pack that I could use for trooping and I didn’t want to use my GB1 foam pack and potentially dent/damage it (maybe I should’ve started a styrene build from the very beginning lol). Thats when I had the idea to make a “V7.5” pack, one that is meant for going out with, but would be built far better and last. I wasn’t sure what the basis for this pack would be though, but as I continued working on my GB1 pack, I remembered that a lot of the top section parts I had already made were from the same poor quality foam that was used on the Fan Expo pack. It should’ve been obvious, but the quality of foam board makes a real difference in how your final result will turn out. I used to use white glue to attach parts, but this caused warping and was a mess, so I tried using a glue stick instead with some good quality foam for the sync gen and it turned out great! I also realized that I had a lot of old parts I collected that I wasn’t going to use for my GB1 pack like a Heavy props bumper, a BoK motherboard, nfilter, and ion arm.

All of these factors created this perfect storm that I could just use what I had already built for my new trooping pack, so thats exactly what happened. For this pack, I also decided to stop worrying so much about perfection and its been coming out great! Heres how shes looking. Some of those parts are from the old pack, but I’m really happy with how the cyclotron and crank gen looks compared to my old pack.






Heres the two together, poor thing



Meanwhile for my GB1 pack, I was actually able to rebuild the entire top section relatively quickly and they are some of the best parts I’ve made in a while! I hope I can start the sync gen soon for this one.




When I first began this project nearly 2 years ago, I always imagined it as one build, but the truth is that this thread has basically been a documentation of almost 4 builds. I never anticipated it would take this many twists and turns but this journey would have never happened if I had just bought a spirit pack. Right now, I want to finish my trooping pack before I get back to working on this build full time. I’m anticipating it will take around a month, and I’m not sure if I should document the progress here or if I’m allowed to make a new thread for that build. Anyways, sorry that its been such a strange journey. I know the forums are a little bit quiet, but GBFans will forever hold a place in my heart. Thank you so much to everyone for sticking with me on this journey and for reading, all comments are welcome

[alphabeta001]

Shame to see the version 7 got damaged, but 7.5 is looking good so far.
To be honest they are all looking amazing and it's great to see you carrying on with the builds

[edspengler]

Wow what a great build, I can’t believe I am just catching up on it now! I have not felt the inspiration lately to work on things, but reading through your build diary is motivating!

[OnEdge]

Shame to see the version 7 got damaged, but 7.5 is looking good so far.
To be honest they are all looking amazing and it's great to see you carrying on with the builds

Thanks for always sticking around! Its been quite the journey haha.

Wow what a great build, I can’t believe I am just catching up on it now! I have not felt the inspiration lately to work on things, but reading through your build diary is motivating!

Wow! I’m really glad my build was able to inspire you I appreciate it . I’m looking forward to your finished build!

[OnEdge]

Okay everyone I got good news! The shell for 7.5 is finally done . I decided I would post the updates here since these two builds are so intertwined but I’ll start from the beginning. I apologize in advance for the amount of images in this post, theres a lot to share!

One of my most procrastinated areas of the pack was the corner plate. It’s a relatively straight forward part to build and it was one of the last things stopping me from moving onto the next phase. I got scarred from using EVA foam on my last pack since it was so unstable, so I wanted to try using the method Chris Bosh did in his build, which was to create a channel to fill putty in. I also did this method for the cyclotron. In the past I disregarded filling/sanding, but it became more apparent that the project would benefit a lot if I did.

I cut out the base and the top and measured it to create the sides.





I then moved onto to finishing up the gun mount. On my last pack, I didn’t like how square the ribs were considering how rounded off they were on the real pack, so I wanted to try and bend it over the edge to get that effect. I cut out the entire shape, and used my heavy metal ruler to create the bend. This was also how I made the bend for the sync gen. I also sanded the corners to round them.





I admit that the ribs didn’t come out the best since I didn’t cut the rib long enough so I had to add extra material at the bottom of it. One other thing I wanted to share is that I also remade the bridge from gun mount to the crank gen since I also wanted the edges to have that nice rounded look like real packs. Believe it or not, it took a lot of attempts to get it right (those darn measurements) and I still didn’t get it quite right for 7.5, but for 8 I was able to get it perfect.






I then proceeded to finish up the details on the crank gen. I just had to add some styrene plastic to cap off the PVC pipe and used some foam board that I just ripped the paper off of to finish that taper I made. I also made the EDA discs from pex tubing capped off with styrene. I didn’t quite add the rivet detail since I was feeling lazy, but I’ll definitely try doing that on my next pack. I was now finally able to move onto filling and sanding! I decided I was going to try and use wood filler since epoxy putties like milliput/magic sculpt seemed a bit too expensive for me. The first parts I wanted to do were the cyclotron, corner plate, and crank gen.

Before I started to fill, I sealed the parts with white glue. Heres the parts with their first filling. A note on the cyclotron: When I was originally building it, I messed up the height of the sides, so when I attached the base, the cyclotron was way too tall, so I had to rip off the base and hack away at the side with a blade to shorten it up. This made it so the cyclotron doesn’t actually sit flush whoops! The top also naturally ended up bowing because I placed the bumper on top of it when I finished it.






After it all dried, I then began to sand away. This stuff wasn’t easy to sand and it was hard to get the shape right, but I bought some new wood filler when I ran out, and it was much easier and better to work with. After a lot of rounds of constantly sanding and checking, I decided it was good enough since it was so much work getting everything perfectly smooth. I then wanted to attach everything together so I can begin working on filling and sanding the seams.

Heres the crank gen, gun mount, and corner plate all attached together. I’m genuinely really happy it all looks! Especially that darn crank gen. I’m so glad I went with this route and not how I was going to do it in the past.



Heres the shell fully attached, this was such an awesome moment for me after so long!



Before I started to fill and sand everything for the last time I realized something. I forgot to add the sync gen plates. That was pretty embarrassing so I quickly cut out all the plates, and made the boxes at the bottom out of the same styrene plastic. I was then able to finish sanding and start painting

Heres that finished result.



I then coated the whole thing with white glue, and I wanted to try something new. We all know already about the texture on the hero packs and it’s specific look. Homax wall spray was the primary method of replicating it, but my experience with it is terrible and it’s super hard to get right. Even when you do it right, it doesn’t look all that right. Chris found out that Krylon truck bed texture worked really well, but I couldn’t find anywhere that sold it, and ProTex was not an option either. I was not interested in buying many different texture sprays just to see what it would look like either. I then remembered how Chris said he tried stippling Elmers glue on and that intrigued me. He said it wasn’t close enough, but I thought that if it looked good enough for me, I would be happy with it so I tried it on a small test piece and it surprised me because I thought it looked great! I thought this pack would be a great candidate to try that method out so I did that and followed RedSpecial’s guide on where the texture should be.

Heres that small test piece.



When the glue from the stippling finally dried, there was a bit of a problem. A lot of air bubbles formed from the stippling process of the glue, so when it dried those air bubbles stood out like a sore thumb and looked bad. The texture itself wasn’t too bad and I think its way better than that bumpy mess that was on my last pack. I think this method might have some potential for my GB1 pack, so I’m gonna see if I can maybe experiment more to see if I can get rid of those air bubbles. There wasn’t much I could do at that point so I painted the whole thing with Rustoleum grey primer, and with that, the shell was finally done!





















Finally heres a picture with the bumper on .



The shell is imperfect in so many ways, but like the real pack, it’s still so beautiful . The paint really helped me feel better about the result, and it is such a gratifying feeling to stand back and look at it to say I built it. I’m getting closer to finishing this one, I just have to build a few more parts and then attach everything together. Thank you so much to everyone in the community for their research and guidance, and for reading this post!

[tobycj]

For the air bubbles, you could try gentle heating with a heat gun once applied.

[alphabeta001]

Love it. Even with the air bubbles it still looks great.

Nice to see a build that is physically made