Ghostbusters 2016 Proton pack
In 2015 it was announced that Paul Feig was making a new Ghostbusters movie. On June 30th of 2015 Feig posted this picture of the new proton pack from set:
Now my friends have a tradition of blowing up a Ghostbusters prop on the 4th of July. I was planning on attending and this was too good of an opportunity to pass up. I now had 3 days to build a replica of a prop with only a single image. Since it was just going to be blown up anyway it didn't have to be up to even cosplay standards so a junk build was called for. Step 1 was to take a trip to the hardware store for supplies.
A couple plastic sink tubes, a shower hose, some PVC pipe, rubber tubing, windows screen and a sheet of MDF got me started. After staring at the reference picture for a while I got an idea of the basic shapes involved and made a guess at sizes and dimensions. I cut out the motherboard and attached a base plate with angle brackets and rivets.
I then built the main components out of black foamcore and random junk I had sitting around.
By that point I'd killed a day. It looked like I would be able to actually pull it of in time. The next day the cyclotron was built up with foamcore around a bucket then capped off with plastic.
With no alternate views I had no information on what the thrower controls were supposed to look like so I just tossed on a bunch of lights and switches.
With everything going together quickly I decided to really nuts and add the lights. I cut the 7-segment displays out of styrene with an xacto blade and back lit them with green LEDs.
I used normal thrower grips modified with some sculpting putty for the thrower. PVC pipe and other assorted junk for the detail bits.
Some wires and a bit of paint and that's the pack replica finished in two days.
That weekend I took it up to my buddy's place in New Hampshire for the 4th of July festivities. We hung it on the wall with the rest of the gear, took some glamour shots with us wearing it and then tweeted an image at Paul Feig himself who proceeded to like the tweet.
Riding high on the attention we then took the pack out to a field, filled it with gunpowder and gasoline and set it off.
We then tweeted the results to Feig and got this reply:
Which amused us to no end.
Tweet
