User avatar
By bigi71
#327100
Thanks guys :)
Cole Funstuff wrote:Your cable organization brings a tear to my eye. You don't happen to have a picture of the gun with any of the other lights in action do you? I'm excited to see your faux VFD bar graph in action with everything else.
I dont have a pic or vid of it yet but im gonna be working on getting one soon. Hopefully it wont take ages but we will see ^.^

Today i added one more thing to the pack:
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I just put pipe insulation foam around there and then glued another piece of foam on it to get the thick padding. Before that i had to rip the foam out of some old case so that already "weathered" it a lot, lol
User avatar
By bigi71
#328020
Thanks :)

But i have to blame you for something Nick, haha....how you changed the alice straps on your 3rd one and how good they look makes me want to do that too, so there will be more updates if i can figure it out =)

Today i have an update about something completely different though. I wasnt 100% happy with the sanded spot on the lower left part of my cyclotron so i wanted to make it look more like it was actually repaired with filler there.
So i started by drawing the shape of the area i wanted to fill and then i used my dremel to get that shape into the fiberglass:
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As you can see i also drilled some big and a lot of smaller holes there to give the filler maximum grip and a lot of surface to stick to.

I also did the same thing in this little area:
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After i was happy with the shapes of these areas i mixed some filler (the same one i had used on the styrene master) and tinted it with a tiny amount of yellow particles to make it look aged. Then i just filled, sanded, painted, sanded again, smeared some pastels on there to make it look even older and ended up with this:
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Now that looks way better and more accurate too i think :)

Some close ups of the bottom one of the cosmetic plates:
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I also changed the amount of grey vs black on this one, now theres much more black than before.

On the inside of the area on the cyclotron i put a glob of epoxy on the shell where the filler came through the holes i drilled:
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I doubt this will ever come off ^.^

Just for fun i also did a little stencil thing on the inside of my shell, hehe:
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:)
User avatar
By mburkit
#328028
Seriously, Bjorn. You make my GB1 pack that is supposed to be a replication of Dan Aykroyd's pack in the Sedgwick look like I made it out wet cardboard and masking tape. I am completely convinced you have put more work into this pack then anyone else has in theirs, including the original film makers with the original screen used packs.

You scare me sometimes.
User avatar
By bigi71
#328036
parksdesign wrote:Can't top that German engineering. Your intentional mistakes look better than my well thought out plans. How dare you, sir! :D
Thanks Brian, you helped a lot on this with your awesome transfers :)
mburkit wrote:Seriously, Bjorn. You make my GB1 pack that is supposed to be a replication of Dan Aykroyd's pack in the Sedgwick look like I made it out wet cardboard and masking tape. I am completely convinced you have put more work into this pack then anyone else has in theirs, including the original film makers with the original screen used packs.

You scare me sometimes.
Not my intention to scare you Matt, but thanks for the kind words, it means a lot to me. And i would never consider your pack a piece of cardboard, hehe...i still think its one of the best ones ever made :)
Im just having some fun with adding this and that to the pack, its almost like an addiction :lol:
User avatar
By Vincenzo330
#329270
bigi71 wrote:I also already installed some electronics on the motherboard of the pack:
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But more about that another time.... :)
I'm back tracking a bit here, but I was just telling someone about your mounting method for the power cell lights and how I'm probably going to borrow your idea for my build pretty soon ;)
By Filandrius
#329342
Matt said it best. Absolutely incredible. If GB3 ever gets off the ground, they should hire you as master prop maker. You would show them how it's done. :)

Scary is the right word. Or crazy. Said in the nicest possible way, of course. :P
User avatar
By bigi71
#330914
Thanks for the kind words Mike. I dont think its a bad thing to be a bit crazy, hehe :)
Vincenzo330 wrote:I'm back tracking a bit here, but I was just telling someone about your mounting method for the power cell lights and how I'm probably going to borrow your idea for my build pretty soon ;)
Always glad if my pack can inspire other builders :) Just make sure to show it off then ;) lol

I made some progress with installing the electronics...got a speaker, battery holder and a lot of miscellaneous small parts. So i was finally able to do this:
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I cut some small pieces of prototype board and mounted the LEDs for the cyclotron lights directely to the speaker that way. No flashlight reflectors for this pack, the LEDs are emitting their light so directional that its not needed at all. You can also see i swapped the thing where the cables from the L-bracket go. Looks much more appropriate this way :)

And this is what the whole motherboard looks like at the moment:
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Still a lot of stuff missing on there, like sound and gun light electronics. But theyre on their way to me so i might have another update really soon. Cant wait to see the gun fully lit ^.^

You might ask why i sprayed the motherboard purple in the middle....well...i already had purple........because of this:
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Again i just wanted it to be a bit closer to the sony lobby hero pack.

One more thing i did was completely changing the parts on the L-bracket on the bottom of the motherboard. Big thanks to Chris for making this possible ! :)
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All the connectors and the switch are wired up already (as you might have seen the in first pic of this post, hehe). The DC input and the XLR connector are wired parallel but the DC input has a little switch contact built in that disconnects the XLR input when a plug is in the DC input. And the switch on there is now just a selector for using either the batteries in the pack or an external power source.
User avatar
By pchrisbosh1
#330941
Glad to help you get those parts for the finest scratchbuild to ever hit the scene. Looks fab Bjorn I haven't wired my bracket up yet still have to do so, are you actually making it functional or cosmetic only? I don't really have a clue what they are used for or even how to wire them up to make them functional. I know your a electronic specialist any chance you could share some info of what they are used for and how to wire them up? That would help me on my build as well :-).

Looks awesome Bjorn my favorite pack ever.
User avatar
By parksdesign
#330942
pchrisbosh1 wrote:Glad to help you get those parts for the finest scratchbuild to ever hit the scene. Looks fab Bjorn I haven't wired my bracket up yet still have to do so, are you actually making it functional or cosmetic only? I don't really have a clue what they are used for or even how to wire them up to make them functional. I know your a electronic specialist any chance you could share some info of what they are used for and how to wire them up? That would help me on my build as well :-).

Looks awesome Bjorn my favorite pack ever.
The level of detail that both of you guys have achieved is astounding. I hope I can get my pack to look 1/10th as good as either of yours. I'm sitting here trying to get the right filler tubes...can't even get that going. :oops:
User avatar
By bigi71
#330961
Thanks a lot Brian and Chris :)
pchrisbosh1 wrote:Glad to help you get those parts for the finest scratchbuild to ever hit the scene. Looks fab Bjorn I haven't wired my bracket up yet still have to do so, are you actually making it functional or cosmetic only? I don't really have a clue what they are used for or even how to wire them up to make them functional. I know your a electronic specialist any chance you could share some info of what they are used for and how to wire them up? That would help me on my build as well :-).
Of course i dont know for sure what they were used for on the screenused ones but i was told it was for charging the batteries and idk....maybe also for DC input too (?). What im going to do is using them both for DC input or at least make it possible to do that, since im not going to use rechargable batteries (you know its a display pack).
Soooo...what i came up with is this:
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Just made this in paint, lol...it wouldve been too awful if i scanned my handdrawn one ;)
I hope this drawing makes sense...if it doesnt always feel free to ask ^.^

What happens if you put a plug into the DC input is that it interrupts the connection to the XLR one so you cant use two power supplies at the same time.

The thing on the bottom represents what i connected all the wires to and where i connected them, and from there one pair of wires goes to the pack/wand electronics and one pair to the battery in the pack.

I also included all the wire colors ive actually used on my build, and the numbers on the XLR connector are just the pin numbers. I tried my best to use the same ones as on the sony hero but its pretty hard to see in the pics.
User avatar
By bigi71
#331471
hahaha, i remember its a pain in the ass to get those out of there, definately much easier on this one :)

But hey, it was my first pack...i didnt know better ;):P
User avatar
By bigi71
#331498
Weight isnt really a concern for me since its gonna be a display pack which i wont wear to conventions all day, so this is why i dont need a rechargable battery. And now since i have the accurate connectors for the L-bracket on the motherboard i can also run the electronics in the pack with a DC power supply when its on display :)
User avatar
By parksdesign
#331506
bigi71 wrote:Weight isnt really a concern for me since its gonna be a display pack which i wont wear to conventions all day, so this is why i dont need a rechargable battery. And now since i have the accurate connectors for the L-bracket on the motherboard i can also run the electronics in the pack with a DC power supply when its on display :)
I thought you might say that.

That's not acceptable. I demand that you run around with it strapped to your back like the rest of us nerds. :)
User avatar
By bigi71
#334061
I finally got all the electronics installed on the motherboard, so i thought its about time to post a couple of pics of the complete setup.

On top of the grey baseplate (which was cut out of an old aluminum traffic sign) is a modified JT94 pack light kit mounted on top of a grid style pc board that holds some relays, timer circuits and a few connectors. I just used those 9V DC relays instead of getting DPDT buttons for the gun, thats why theyre there. The timer circuits are for the speed of the powercell lights and the white blinking light on top of the gun, i wanted to be able to control the speed of those via small potentiometers on the board.

Below that is a hyperdyne light kit for the gun and on the bottom is a small sound module on a grid style pcb. I bought the sound chip for only 10€ from an ebay seller in hongkong and it works perfectly. Cant really beat that price and this little thing just does the same as the actual "prop sound kits" , it plays a sound when you close a switch or button contact and has 5 inputs of that sort, plus a 1GB micro SD card where i can just put the sounds on and i can change them myself at any time. So i can play up to 5 sounds that i can exchange and im really happy with that :)

Ok, now on to the pics....sure its a lot of cables but i think it all looks pretty nice and clean now:
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Between the sound chip and the speaker is a little 8W amplifier which was mounted between the upper LEDs for the cyclotron lights. The small amp and speaker dont look like much, but theyre pretty loud, louder than i would ever need them to be. You can also see how the cables go and how the loom is secured to the motherboard:
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The next pic is for all the people who think the grid style boards suck and always look messy, unorganized and horrible on the underside ;):)
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Another thing i did was giving the painting and weathering of the machined shockmount a shot. I think it turned out pretty good and ribs look like real aged brass now:
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First i dulled the whole thing down with steel wool, especially the front plate, because i wanted to get rid of the "i was turned on a lathe" look. Then i masked the front and spayed the whole thing with golden spraypaint. After that dried for a day i did a washing with thinned down brown paint before adding very very small black marks all over the thing. Next step was dulling the ribs down with some brown pastel chalks out of my tamiya weathering kit. And as the final step i added some green paint particles to get that oxidized look between some of the ribs.

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Now just for fun two more pics of the pack with different lighting:
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I know i was supposed to take a few pictures of the fully lit gun and pack but im too lazy to do it today, lol....ill include them next time :)
User avatar
By bigi71
#335023
Thanks for the nice comments guys :D

One thing that was bugging me on my pack was the HGA label, so i took the idea from Chris to make a small aluminum disc to make the label appear thicker. Acutally it looks like it might have been printed sheet aluminum on the real one, does anyone have any info on this ? ^.^

However, i pulled the old one off my HGA (and damaged it a bit :oops: ) and then i made the small and thin disc with the same dimensions as the label. Then i just put a new label on there, made some small corrections to the disc to really have the exact same size, carefully ripped the protective clear foil off the label and glued the whole thing to my HGA. I think i looks much better and more accurate now:
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Still more to come :)
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