First Commissioned Proton Pack

Well folks, it's happened. I've been contacted by another HUGE Ghostbusters fan (and specifically a fan of the heart of the Ghostbusters, Ray Stanz himself) to create another miniature proton pack. My very first commissioned pack.  I've had offers but it's been more the type of "hey make me one." While this is truly a labor of love, it's a labor. As you can tell from the original build. They take a while, but the end product is something I'm very very proud of. And this time around I hope to improve on a few little tiny issues I had when making the first one.

So here is the build of version 2.0

First up the motherboard. I chose to cut this out of a sheet of plastic this time around to give the pack even more stability and to make it easier to create a cover for the batteries.  We'll see how that works out when we get to that step.  In the original pack there was a planned cover with fell to pieces in my hand. So this should fix the brittleness of wood.  One hopes.

Here is the cyclotron and possibly the biggest piece of the pack. It's made of several layers of wood in order to build it up high enough and allow me to fully carve out in the inside to make room for the electronics.

This is just a rough fit to see how spacing is lining up before priming and sanding. So far so good. Looks a big plain but that'll change soon enough.

This is after the first coat of primer and a little filler. I use Primer and gesso to fill in the wood. It helps to strengthen it and gives a nice base for the pain to stick to. Only down side of gesso is that I feel like halfway through each can it's such a thick substance that no more is willing to come out.  Anyone else use this and find they have this problem?

A couple close ups of the cover to the cyclotron in it's primed and filled stage.  Right before another coat of primer was shot onto it.

After a few more coats of primer and here is a side by side comparison to help me make sure I'm on the right track. I like to use different colors of primer to hilight sections and to help me see what needs to be done. Using one color tends make everything blend together.

And here is an un-primed gun mount box prior to detailing. There is some detailing that needs to be done to the top now that the basic shape is there and the edges have been rounded.

And that's where we are so far folks. It might not seem like a lot, but it is. There is so much sanding and cutting and priming and waiting for each section. And that gets repeated over and over again. More coming soon.  But this is an excellent start to another pack.