#4909471
tobycj wrote: September 30th, 2018, 1:52 pm Looking great! Are you replacing the clippard elbow on top of the ion arm? I've replaced the "screws" on the clippard valve on mine with small hex head bolts too now as a bit of extra detailing.
Oh yea I forgot to mention that one too, I have that elbow but Im waiting for some bigger tubing to come in so it’s on deck!
tobycj liked this
#4910298
Hey guys it's been a while since I've been able to post some updates, working full time and school 4 days a week is draining me haha! I did have one major change during my build though, I decided to go with a full size thrower. My buddy had purchased a full size wand from throwing Chicken for his pack and asked for my help building it, when we built it I liked it so much I ended up ordering one then and there. The 80% Ben of Kent thrower is now going onto another pack I'm going to build for my wife. But enough about me, how about some pictures?

I ordered some Gaffers tape for the foam on the pack and put that on (and also realized how badly I screwed up the top of my motherboard :( )
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Then I started drilling and dremeling out the N-Filter and sacraficed a sink strainer for some mesh filtering. This looks really cool when using the GBfans pack lights and it goes through the overheat sequence and starts flashing white light out of it.
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When I was trying to clean things up on my workbench I found a little bit of blue tubing and a little piece of split loom left over so I added that to the injector tube. Its no where near perfect and eventually I'll do it the correct way but it works for now and was an easy use of some leftover parts. If only that blue tubing had been 1/2" longer it would have at least lined up correctly, oh well!
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Now onto the thrower! This was assembling everything before paint, starting to drill the necesary holes and doing any sanding clean up that was needed. Honestly, I can't say enough about either Ben of Kent or Throwing Chicken's throwers, they're absolutely awesome and you really can't go wrong with either.
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Some beginning paint work after everything was drilled out with the exception of the ear switch.
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Got the rear handle mounted and did my best on some welds
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Switches installed and bar graph temporarily mounted
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Drilling out and mounting the trigger in the ear.
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Throwing Chicken's kits now come with an easy option to make the barrel rotate like in the roof top scene, simples as drilling a hole and adding a scew so I took advantage of that!
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While I was waiting for some paint to dry I went to work mounting the V-Hook on the pack and thrower along with the S hook.
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For those of you wondering what a full size thrower looks like on the spirit pack here are some reference pics
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Just needs some decals on it now, I would really like to find some dry rub decals but those seem to be quite hard to find so these will do for now!
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Decals in place and now it's really coming together.
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Getting the lighting for the wand in place
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Originally I just had the vent light mounted under the vent lines but I didn't like this because I didn't feel it was super bright like the movie. So I gutted an old flashlight and notched/sanded the reflector to fit over the vent.
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It makes a huge difference, when it's on at night it's almost like a flashlight. Unfortunately it looks like the wiring moved a little when I wore it last night and the bulb popped out of center so I'll have to open it back up and fix it.
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More and more wiring
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I mounted the wand board on the gun track for easier access
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I ordered the tube and trigger tip from the shop and both of them are awesome, I'd highly recommend them
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The final thing I did was add Sponge's bezel kit for the bar graph and his amp'd up wand tip and wow what a difference. The bezel kit alone is awesome and the wand tip is much brighter and vibrant when fired
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It's been a fun journey so far and I've definitely had a blast building this and watching it light up and come to life
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tobycj, NickFame13, twmedford23 and 1 others liked this
#4911357
Just thought I'd throw in some updated photos as I've been slowly acquiring some more parts and have found some free time here and there to put them on. I was finally able to find a pair of LC-1 shoulder straps and I know the difference between the LC-1 and LC-2's isn't tremendous but damn do I feel like it is an awesome change.
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I also started working on replacing all the tubing and putting on new resistors. I did my best to try and match the bends of the original packs by staring at stills and tons of other builds on here. I also put on some of the SMC elbows, I'm still looking to try and find some of the correct Legris elbows or some replicas but no luck as of yet.
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Lastly I also redid the injector tubes to be correct with both the red and blue tubing.
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Sorry for the poorer picture quality on some, unfortunately I didn't have the best lighting. I still have the final resistor to put on the ion arm, just need to get a bigger drill bit for that one. I'd also like to grind off the crank knob and put an actual one on there. I've seen some builds were people connect it to a potentiometer and control the soundboard with it so I'm thinking that may be a possibility.
Kingpin, NickFame13 liked this
#4912978
Because I enjoy working on this so much and cant seem to stop here are some more updates!
Got a really nice step bit for christmas and put it to work installing the final resistor
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Then I found a little piece of dowel, painted it with some brass paint and then hit it with some black to match. For a super cheap and easy addition I think it came out looking pretty good. The more I look at that cap though the more I think it needs some more black paint.
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I've been looking for a replacement shock mount but still haven't seen one I like yet so for the time being I painted the spirit one with some brass paint and then added a few missing stickers
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Next up is grinding off the fake crank knob and putting on an actual knob I was lucky enough to come across!
#4913059
chris8414 wrote: January 25th, 2019, 2:37 pm This spirit pack looks great! Awesome job!
Thanks Chris! It’s been a lot of fun to build and has been a good learning project for things that work and things that don’t. Which is definitely going to come in handy when I start building a full size pack hopefully later this year.
#4915218
Because it was a rainy weekend in Socal I decided to learn some new skills! I was lucky enough to stumble into 2 genuine Raytheon crank knobs, one is going to my full size pack build parts box and the other to my spirit pack. I had never worked with resin before but wanted to learn so I ground off the molded crank knob that comes on the pack and refilled it. First time using the resin so it didn't come out perfectly but knowing that it was going to be completely covered by the knob I didn't sweat it too much.
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After refilling and allowing the resin to cure I measured it out and drilled a hole to add a nice potentiometer so that the knob will rotate. Big thank you to Venkman69 who helped me track down the properly sized potentiometer. Love the difference that it makes, plus it gives me the option to wire it to the soundboard to control the volume in the future.
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Next it was onto the thrower and trying to figure out a simple way to make the tip extend. I had ordered the lever from freaky geeky a little while ago while I was researching different ways to do this. It seems like there are some limitations with the resin throwers where you can get the pop mechanisms but lose the barrel rotation which is a big reason I bought the TC thrower. After scouring some threads here I found someone who had built one for a TC thrower using a simple linkage and went off of that.
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Not a tremendous amount of room in there once all the electronics are in but I still got a decent amount of distance out of it. It also holds tight in both the closed and extended positions which is a big plus too. The whole setup cost about $20 and a few hours of tear down and rebuild time so totally worth it in my book!
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#4915251
That build went really smoothly, I just realized I never put those pictures up with the pack I made for my wife. I ended up going with the Jupiter 80% light kit for that wand and putting the full-size in my TC thrower. The GBfans wand kit will fit but there is a lot of modification required to get it to fit and even then it’s a super tight squeeze.
#4942415
Nate42 wrote: November 18th, 2020, 7:38 pm What was the rod that you ended up using for the linkage? What I made won’t fit now that I have the board...I made it prior!
Wow I haven’t looked at this thread in a long time! I used a 4-40 Du-Bro 205 airplane kit for the linkage. You can find them on eBay for $10-$15

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