[D-42]

I'm new to the gbfans and Ghostbusters in general but I've been doing prop building semi-professionally for about 6 years now. I've started working on molds for a Vacuum formed pack. I think I can get better results than most of the vacformed packs I have seen. I spent the day working on a few of the key parts.







I'll post updates as they come.

[D-42]

Some updates from this morning. I hope to be able to do a test pull of the bottom section tonight.

[ThrowingChicken]

Construction skills seem pretty good though it does appear that your spacer is a little taller than it should be.

What kind of set up do you have for vac forming?

[jimbo7]

Not to be nitpicking here, but it also seems like your plates around the spacer are a little uneven?? Just trying to help!

[ThrowingChicken]

To be frank you are not the first to come here in an attempt to bring on the second coming of Vacformed pack shells. Why the other attempts didn't pan out, I couldn't tell you. While I think what you have there is looking pretty damn good, especially if it really is a days work, like Jimbo above I would advise you to go for the gusto and not fudge the details.

[ironfist]

Your over doing it. Make the spacer a single pull. Then the cyclotron another . That's how you will get better detail.make the pack 5 seperate parts that the buyer can either glue or bolt togeather.

[D-42]

I've been doing some clean up to even out the spacers and get the gaps just right. I'm not promising the second coming, the fiberglass will always make for better detail, hands down. Just from what I've seen of other vacpulls I think I can do at least as good and better in some ways.

I have a home made vactable 24x24 that I spent about 2 years tweaking it and another 5 just useing. http://www.tk386.com/beerkegvactable/ is from the first month or so of build, there's been a lot of changes since.

I hate assembly but love building molds, we'll see how well I can do at it. My second choice would be to do vacuum bagged fiberglass lays. I've been playing with it a lot lately and like the results. getting super thin casts that are strong enough to stand on. Could do a fiberglass shell and have it weigh less than a vacpull yet be stronger. It's just a lot more involved work to do it.

Talking with the local GB group here I think someone has a fiberglass mold that I may try a vacuum bag pull on. I only know the local guys from joint 501st events. We've chatted a quite a bit but haven't gotten together with anything yet.

[ThrowingChicken]

Well I do wish you the best of luck, as I too am waiting for someone to release an inexpensive but not outrageously inaccurate version of the shell.

Oh, and while you are here, familiarize yourself with the seller rules.

[D-42]

First test pull. I am still missing one detail on the spacers. So far it looks really promising though:





And because I've been accused of not documenting things enough, here is a quick video covering the first test pull Sorry the audio is really low, but I go over some of the changes I will make for the next pulls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKdX4AVe1K0

Wow, rewatching the video you can see my nice black and blue thumb. while driving a screw in the drill slipped and nailed my thumb and blackened up my thumbnail a bit.

[ThrowingChicken]

Well hell, I'm sold.

[Screwhead]

wow, that looks awesome!

[ThrowingChicken]

You might consider adding the holes for the tubes and where the ribbon cable goes.

[D-42]

Ohh, Just to be clear, I haven't said at all yet that I was going to be selling these. (not that I wont) This project is specifically for me and a friend for Halloween. I have read through and have always practiced exactly what was in the rules for gbfans sales.

Now the real reason I am bringing this all up here and not just working on it in my back yard, I will be looking to use them as trade value so I can build out the rest of the parts. I will be looking to get a hold of as many original parts and pieces as I can. Just keep that in mind, once I have the molds complete and I can get 10-15 of these on hand I'll start asking around a bit more.

[ThrowingChicken]

Well regardless, this came out amazingly well, and for a day's worth of work too boot! I'd still include intentions for the tubes and ribbon cable, like you have for the holes in the center rings around the cyclotron. Should make things easier for you later.

[D-42]

Yea, this was just a test to be sure that it was going to work at all.

I didn't video the pack pull, but here is a sandtrooper ab plate being pulled on my table:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePV0irbeYbY

[kind2311]

something is off, you have 16 cosmetic plates but they dont wrap around the spacer as far as they should.

[D-42]

You are right, I think I made them too small, I'll have to redo them. Thanks a lot Kind2311. Give me more work to do.

[nick-a-tron]

Dont skimp on the details and accuracy. You obviously have the skill to make some VERY nice vac-formed shells so get the details right and you'll have another buyer right here.

[ironfist]

What's the size of your vacuum motor? I'm on the process of building a vacation table. I think I meed to pick Your brain! Lol

[jimbo7]

I'm impressed with how it all turned out.

[Vincenzo330]

Definitely impressed with this so far. Most of the time when someone mentions a vac shell people just shrug and ignore. These could make some waves in the community.

Let's see some pics of that Fett armor too

[joeghostbuster]

I'm in for one!

[D-42]

Please, no requests to buy until I am set up and post in the for sale area. I don't want to upset the site owners, and wont sell until I meet the minimum qualifications to do so on this site as well as have a small stock in hand. I just ordered the plastic though and hope I can pick it up later in the week.

[BSjohnson]

Veeeeery nice work. That test pull looks nice and crisp. Like everyone else is saying, work to get those details exactly right and you'll have a fantastic shell.

I'm curious to hear more about these vacuum bagged fiberglass lays. I've never heard of such a thing.

[ironfist]

Oh Yeah I forgot about that. I also have no clue what this is? But if it leeds to a superlight pack, I wanna know!!!!!

[D-42]

The vacuum bag process I first learned about from a show called "How it's made" on Discovery/TLC. In the show they were using it to make carbon fiber cellos. Carbon fiber is layed almost identical to fiberglass so I wanted to try it out. Since then I've found that it is very popular in the model airplane community due to being able to make very lightweight strong model airplane parts.

Basically it involves laying fiberglass not much different than normal, then putting down a layer of PealPly. The pealply is a nylon cloth with a mold release on it. Over that you put in an absorbent batting then put the entire thing in a bag and vacuum it with a high grade 30hg pump like for doing A/C work. the pealply is pores enough to allow the resin to soak through into the batting and only leaves just enough to fill the gaps in the fiberglass cloth. After it has cured the pealply and batting are removed.

You can check around on youtube I saw a lot of videos show up just from a quick search. I didn't watch any though as I want to get back to work on the pack molds.

Updates later tonight, I'm going to rip off all the spacers and figure out what I did wrong.

[BSjohnson]

Sounds pretty cool. I'll have to look up more info on it. I might even look into constructing my own Keg Table. xD It'll at least be fun emptying the keg first.

[D-42]

There is a ratio that I don't know for sure the exact details of, but a ~15 gallon keg to a 6cfm vacuum pump isn't quite it. 80% of the stuff I do it works perfect. on a 24x24 table with a 6cfm vacuum pump, if i was going to do it all over again I'd go with a 60 gallon water heater tank for the vacuum source, or a 20+cfm vacuum pump if I was to stay with the keg. The water heater tank would be the cheaper of the two. Next year I hope to be moving and getting a real shop rather than my back patio, yard and two small sheds. I plan to fill that shop with a 4'x4' vacuum table and will probably use a 20cfm pump and 150ish gallon storage tank, but I'd be able to do packs in one piece and probably 4-5 at a time.

[D-42]

OK, update for the night:

some quick black paint on the older one still wet in these photos


and a dry one looks much better than the wet ones


So due to the critisism of the spacers I checked out the back and found I made them too small, too close together and too many of them:


Part of the problem was my printer broke so I had to make the translation from my office PC to the work shop and it got lost somewhere along the way. At work I printed out everything so I have a hard copy. Useing that I lined everything up and traced out where the spacers should go. None lined up very well.

*I know they are flipped, I took that into account and reversed the parts. I had to flip the mold over to work from the back

So I cut them all off and sanded it down


and put new ones in place






I also added some of the other requested details and fixed some measurement errors in the upper connector section as well.
I then did another test pull in the last piece of old plastic I had laying around.

[D-42]

Ohh, another video review of the latest pull:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fccHNUERJXA