User avatar
By bigi71
#281921
Thanks man :)

I didnt do much the last days but at least ive got a few bits and bobs done.

For now im using the legris elbow replicas Jason made and theyre really great little pieces but i wasnt very happy with the matte finish so i carefully removed the threaded bottom piece and used a nail polishing file set (!) to make the plastic more glossy. Just to add a little extra accuracy to them. The left one is still unpolished and the right one shows how they look after the manicure:
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Im happy with the result :)

Then it was time to work on the gun. I got brown resin grips from Nick and theyre awesome, but again i wanted to add a little personal touch to them by sanding them a lot and making the grooves a bit sharper. But before i did that i added a channel to the back of the front grip to run the wires thru:
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And now a picture of the front grip installed on my gun:
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And the other one:
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Sure it would be more accurate if i used rivets but i was afraid it would crack into two halves if i did that. So i just used some screws instead.

Now on to another part of the gun....how cheap can you be when you install the split loom ? well...i guess next pic will tell ^.^
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Yeah....thats a black zip tie. I did this just to test how strong it would be and im suprised how nicely it holds the loom. Of course ill disassemble everything when im going to paint it.

I also rounded the fins of the heat sink for GB2 accuracy:
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And to end this post heres a pic of the almost complete gun:
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By D-42
#281936
Wow!! Just Wow. Your build skills are amazing. One thing I did notice about your fiberglass, thicker is not always better. More glass and less resin will win out in strength. The resin is brittle and will crack under stress.

Look into vacuum bagging. It'll add a few steps to the process but you should be able to make a stronger shell with less resin and more glass and weigh less than 3-4 lbs.

A quick look on youtube found this as probably the most relitive peice as to what you'd do with your existing mold:



You'd skip the resin infusion part and use pealply and batting though. If you're interested in more let me know I've done this with some boba fett helmets and had helmets there were less than 1lb and still strong enough to support my full weight. They could also be thrown against a brick wall with only scratches as damage.
User avatar
By bigi71
#281937
Thanks for your compliment :)

That looks really interesting, but acutally the shell isnt so thick because of too much resin...i mean i think so, im not an expert on this. But for the gun mount box and some other spots its at least 5 layers of mat so i guess thats mostly what it makes a bit thick there. Thats really not too many layers for that part i think and i checked if it would crack by standing on it so it should be good enough for a display piece. Before i made this one ive also made one with 3-4 layers of mat and it was a lot thinner but i wanted this one to be extra strong. Hmm...maybe ill try what you showed me next year...when it gets warmer outside. Right now i cant see myself making more shells. ^.^

Edit: just watched some more vids and i think its too much overkill for me so im probably not going to try it, we will see, hehe.
By D-42
#281945
It depends, if you were just making 2-3 for yourself and don't care about the weight then yes hand layed is easiest. If you were planning to produce several for sell then I'd suggest looking more into it. The finished parts come out so nice when done. None of the needles on the inside :)
By gbrob
#281961
Geeeeeeezus.

bigi71 wrote:Thanks man :)

And to end this post heres a pic of the almost complete gun:
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By Skyknight
#282179
This looks better every day, if that's even possible.

Makes that scratchbuilt piece of wood I call a pack look like...a piece of junk!

You should make more of those shells and sell them under the brand "Proton Packs for Dummies", because every dork could make a great looking pack if he had one of those to start from ;)
User avatar
By bigi71
#282373
Danke :)
Filandrius wrote:This pack will be the most accurate pack this site has ever seen. It's not even funny.
Way too early to say anything like that, maybe im gonna paint it pink or something ;)

Today i got another small part done, the ribbon cable clamp. For this piece...err...i mean for these two pieces i used some leftover sheet aluminum from the motherboard. First i messed with the measurements and then i cut out a cardboard template to make sure the size and proportions are correct. After i was done with that i drew an outline of the template on the metal:
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Then i cut it out with the same saw i had used for the motherboard....pretty simple, pretty easy. But it was fun to do this and after cleaning up the two pieces, drilling the holes for the screws and removing all the burr i had something to dry fit on my shell:
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I still need the correct screws for this tho, i had to remove them from my ion arm to do the test fitting ^.^
User avatar
By bigi71
#286097
....so far so good...ive got some aluminum tube and round material i bought on ebay so it was time to cut the booster tube and the filler plugs. I guess cutting them isnt very interesting to see but i took a pic of how i made the plug for the booster tube:
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Its just a piece of solid stock bolted to a circular piece and an L-bracket. All this was cut and filed by hand and it took ages to get the circle perfectly round but i think it was worth it, I didnt want a gap there so you can see into the tube.
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I didnt decide yet if im going to get the tube, the little round piece of aluminum between the tube and the ion arm and the ion arm welded together or if i just apply fake welds. Hmm...time will tell.
Same for the filler plugs...maybe ill get them welded to the base plates...maybe not:
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Still gotta drill and tap the hole for the clippard brass fitting there too.

Another thing i got done is the mechanism for the extending gun tip, here you can see the stuff i used:
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I changed a few minor parts after this photo was taken but most is still the same. Now this shot doesnt make sense without seeing what it looks like assembled so here we go with both positions, extended and retracted:
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Is just a tube which slides back and forth inside another tube...just like my old gun or PVJ´s gun but its all a bit smaller and the springs are outside of the larger tube. The blue spring is only for damping the impact when its released, i wanted to add this to make sure the acrylic is not going to break.

A small spring holds the green lever up so it automatically "locks" itself:
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And in the following two pics you can see how its all held in place:
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All of this can be completely disassembled, theres no glue involved at all. Aaaaand no additional holes in the gun body were needed...ok, except for one but its covered up by one of the side discs so you cant see it from outside.

A short video of it:

It works very well :-D

I also already installed some electronics on the motherboard of the pack:
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But more about that another time.... :)
By Filandrius
#286098
At this moment i'm torn between hating you and loving you. I'll decide later, I'm too impressed. :shock:

I've said it before and I'll say it again: you're making us look bad! :D
User avatar
By bigi71
#286107
Thanks :)

Well, for the wires i have two options: either drill a small hole thru the two metal plates which hold the tubes and the blue spring and feed them thru that hole or do it like they did it on the hero gun in the sony lobby. I´ll probably go with the first option tho. It shouldnt be a problem to do this, theres plenty of room in the front handle for some extra lenght of wire.
User avatar
By mburkit
#286110
Well the hero wands had 2 different sets of lights in the barrel: the flash bulb at the end of the wand and flashers inside the handle to continue to fire after the flash bulb was blown. The wiring for the flash bulb ran underneath the front grip and up through the gun ears, into the legris banjos and into the clear tip behind the trigger tip. The flashers (which most people use LEDs for now) were inside the front handle, probably behind the clear tip somewhere. The second set of flashing lights is what I'm asking about.

Just curious, that's all. I've been trying to redesign my extending tip mech over the past few weeks and that's always been on of the issues: having enough room for the LEDs to run up the inside of the front handle.
User avatar
By bigi71
#286114
Ah, yeah i meant the wiring to power the flash bulb. I didnt know they had more lights inside the tube but it makes sense they had them...i didnt really think about that before, lol ^.^

Anyway, having enough room inside the handle would be no problem for me, since the tube which is attached to the acrylic tube is only 10mm OD. So between this tube and the inner wall of the front handle is plenty of room actually. Sure i could aslo feed the wires thru the inside of the small tube which would be similar to this (its a pic of my old gun) :
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But im pretty sure it wouldnt last long and the wires would get cut or id get a short or something.

btw...did you already post pics of your mechanism or did i just miss them ? Would be very interesting to see :)
User avatar
By bigi71
#287663
Oh god, you make me blush Vinny.
But thanks for the kind words :)

Today i messed around with my alice frame to make it look more used.
I really like the look of the screenused packs as they are now so thats what im going for with this build.

But what can you do if you already have a heavily used black anodized alice frame ? On at least some of the screenused ones they had apparently painted alice frames which were already black before too. So i tried to get a kinda similar finish with a lot of worn off paint.

So i did a lot of masking with tape and liquid latex stuff:
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The white spots are masking fluid which wasnt completely dry at this point.

Then i just spraypainted it flat black, removed all the tape and rubber bits on there and got this finish:
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I like this much better than it was before :)
User avatar
By bigi71
#289310
Another little update :)

I got my HGA welded this morning:
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And an N-Filter too:
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Yeah....there already was one on my shell, but i choose to replace it with one made from aluminum. It wasnt the most easy thing to do and it required a lot of test fitting but i like this new one much better. Heres the finished piece...cut, filed, sanded and drilled:
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I measured and marked everything on it very carefully to not screw it up, but for working on it i used only simple tools. It was cut with the electric jigsaw i used for my motherboard too.

This one is slightly larger than the one that already was on my shell, in fact this new one is 2.75" inner diameter with like 2.5mm wall thickness while the old one was 2.75" outer diameter. So it fits perfectely on what i left of the old one:
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This slightly larger size looks pretty good and accurate too i think and its closer to the 3" that Cyland said is correct for this piece.

Its a very tight fit and im pretty sure it would have stayed in place even without any glue but i covered the remains of the old N-filter in epoxy and put some on the inside too:
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Sure its hangs off the spacer a bit more now but not too much...this is what it looks like from the outside:
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I think the guy who welded this did a fantastic job in replicating the welds of the originals :)

One more little thing i changed was the L-bracket for the injectors, its now rounded for some more accuracy:
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The status of the whole pack at the moment:
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:-D
User avatar
By pchrisbosh1
#289346
Simply amazing Bjorn. That n-filter weld looks fantastic, great stuff. I'm excited to see it finished, it's almost there.
User avatar
By Vincenzo330
#289355
nick-a-tron wrote:OUTSTANDING!! Wont be long until you have a bumper for it too ;)
And accurate hardware too ;)

Just curious, are you going to disassemble everything again before painting? I see some stuff attached that looks pretty permanent already (like the injector tubes.) I've just gotta know what crazy scheme you have cooked up for getting that pretty lady painted.
User avatar
By bigi71
#289382
Thanks for the kind words :)
Vincenzo330 wrote:Just curious, are you going to disassemble everything again before painting?
Not everything....but everything i can, hehe. As you said the injectors are permanently attached now and so is the N-filter, so these two things will stay on there when i paint it.

Edit:
I forgot...the booster tube will stay on there too since there needs to be a fake weld where it meets the tapered part of the eda box. But i didnt do this weld line yet.
By KagaSakai
#289392
And here I am worried that the finish on my shock mount won't end up looking right....... It's the least of my worries compared to you pack.

Stunning work, Bigi! :-P
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