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While this may not be the most screen accurate, though I'd say if you already own a Spirit pack you probably were willing to make some sacrifices or creative liberties.... so with that in mind, I feel this barrel mod looks MUCH better on the spirit wand than the stock plastic piece. If you're interested, follow my tutorial :)

Sorry for the dirty rug, but I don't have a workspace in my NYC apartment, so the livingroom rug takes it for the team

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PS this is my first venture into the Ghostbusters world so take it easy on me! I am a Star Wars prop builder, I have a Boba Fett page you can follow and enjoy my adventures on instagram! :)http://www.instagram.com/jcfett

Let's begin!

To start, order yourself a 5/8" acrylic rod, of your desired length, I went with 18" so I had room for mistakes, just in case! This is the one I ordered: https://www.ebay.com/itm/292356501575

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It turned out, cutting it in half I was able to do two wands with it when mounting the rod to the two internal post holes that are located inside the barrel handle of the Spirit Wand once you open it. If you wanted to do a single post hole like the stock barrel which is much shorter, you could definitely get 4 or more barrels out of an 18" rod, but I liked the stability of mounting the longer acrylic barrel with both posts. I was able to cut my acrylic rod using a simple hand saw, it was swift to saw through and easy to sand smooth the edges.

Next you'll want to dremel out the holes in the acrylic rod to mount to the posts. It needs to be a top and bottom hole to allow the posts to go through. The bottom holes are larger as the posts are larger at the bottom half of the wand. Place your acrylic rod directly in the half shell of the wand with the desired length of barrel overhanging, and simply mark with a permanent marker the post locations by birds eyeing it, you want it centered but it doesn't need to be 1000% accurate, as you will drill this out later and there is room for adjustment.

Once the post hole locations are marked it's time to make some holes! I used a drill gun, started with a small bit and worked my way up to a larger bit, then used dremel to expand the hole exactly to what I needed. The acrylic rods took well to the drill gun, didn't get any cracking, the thickness of the rod definitely made it stable, but still drill with care as I'm sure you could crack it if you were reckless.

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After the holes are drilled you slide the wired LED up through the center of the rod, then place the bottom half of the wand posts into the holes, you'll want to make sure the wires go around the posts, and at the very top post the LED will actually sit perfectly right up over the last post, allowing it to "sit" on it, holding the LED perfectly in place at the mouth of the wand barrel hole.

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If you did your holes good enough the halves will snap together and hold everything in place, the wires around the posts and the LED sitting on the barrel end post, no gluing or anything additional necessary to hold things. If you find that the halves of the wand are not perfectly snapping together, check your holes on the acrylic rod, I was able to enlarge the holes on an end I felt was too snug, and with that wiggle room I was able to get my halves to snap together perfectly closed.

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Next is the barrel clamp, it was not possible at all to slide the clamp off the stock barrel, so I had to cut away the barrel, and then carefully dremeled out the center leaving just the ring.

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Kinda makes a nice wedding ring ;)

After that, we need to fit it to the barrel, I exacto sliced some black tape and ran it along the inside of the ring to get it to fit the barrel snug. Then I had to find a screw to replace the fake clamp screw, this will allow us to screw it into the barrel so it holds nice. Not sure if flathead is accurate to the clamp, I'm guessing this entire piece is inaccurate altogether haha, but I decided to stick with it anyways since that's what the Spirit had.

Oddly enough despite all the bins of different screws I have, a standard lightswitch plate cover screw looked and worked the best. It's the perfect length, just had to sand off the white paint on the top of the head.

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You'll want to drill through the fake screw, into the rectangle box, down through the ring.

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Next lineup where you want your barrel clamp to sit and mark the hole, you'll want the rectangle housing on the barrel clamp to sit level with the rectangle that's mounted at the top of the wand's end. There are likely better colloquial terms for these parts, but hey I'm new, so deal with it lol.

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Drill your hole for the barrel clamp

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Fasten your barrel clamp with your screw.

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Lookin' good

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Feeling' good

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and finished your finished look with your ghostlabs / spongeface cosmetic upgrades, adding the wire.

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Thanks for following along, feel free to ask any questions, but this is pretty straight forward, so enjoy!

1 thing I do realize would be a worth upgrade, is to add the silver clamp that goes around the mount of the wand, this appears to be accurate to the images I see of originals, and it would also conceal the LED from being less visible.

Enjoy a video of the wand modification in action with ghostlabs/spongeface pack light kit upgrades! Can't wait for the soundboard and wand light kits!!! Big shoutout to Doug! He's the man!!!

https://i.imgur.com/vgX2IeO.mp4

(ps if anyone knows how to embed video... lmk!)
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