#173565
GhostGuy wrote:Hey guys, I found these light sticks at Home Depot. They're with the saftey equipment in the aisle with the nuts and bolts:

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They have three or four modes, some flashing, some with a flashlight in the base on as well. They'd work well as a power cell, or on the end of a proton gun! They come in green, blue, and red, and could easily be cut down to whatever length you need. They're about 7" long.

In regards to these light sticks, I just bought a couple, and I have some great news to report!

First, in case you missed it, AC Moore has orange ones.

Second, I dissaembled one last night and it turns out that the circuit inside the handle is one tiny circuit board with tiny pushbutton switch acitvated by the larger switch on the outside of the casing. When you remove it from the casing you get a tiny plastic cylinder which has 3 button cells in it, which is only slightly too large to fit inside the thrower's barrel. But when you remove two tiny screws from the bottom and pull out the batteries, you can remove that plastic casing and put the batteries back in, and it then fits easily inside the barrel! Plus there's a tiny reflector in the main casing for the flashlight part which you can probably get out of there somehow, and which also looks like it might fit in the barrel!

These sticks have several modes. Flashlight on, glow stick on, glow stick and flashlight on, and glowstick flash. In the flash mode, it flashes about 2 times a second.

I think I'll be grabbing a second light stick from AC moore today, because I can put the orange end of one pointing out the thrower or out the bar graph and have it flash, and the other one I can have lit solid and have the white light pointing towards the front of the gun box and the orange light pointing out the back where the bargraph display is. And the red LED cap will serve to color the light coming from that red. So I'll have all accurate colors. :-) Plus there's a 40% off coupon on acmoore.com but they're on sale for only $4 right now so you can't use that unless they go back to being $7.

Oh and did I mention the light stick part of the thing would be an acceptable substitute for clear tubing if you're building a pack on the cheap? :cool:
#173989
Can anyone give me an idea for a dixie cup holder replacement? I've gone most everywhere and have yet to find anything resembling a v-hook. My method of using magnets has gone awry. Any help is greatly appreciated.
#174255
I don't know where you could get a dixie hook, but maybe you could engineer something. Home Depot and Lowes have these mirror clips. They are like shaped like this: [_ and the gap is 1/4". If you put two of them together you might have something you could slip a piece of aluminum into.
#174491
Gareee wrote:
GhostGuy wrote:The skeleton lights don't cycle? What do they do? If they're constant on, you might as well have just tossed a flashlight in the pack. :-)
They slowly color shift.. each led has 3 colors is shifts to.. it's a pretty nifty lighting effect, but not cycling".
A cool idea I used was to use 4 blinking jacolantern from the dollar store and take them apart and fasten them to the inside of your cyclatron like this.

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I also put velcro under the pan so it was easily removable and I could change batteries
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They all blink in random order so if you turn all switches right after the other, they are random, but blink all around, kinda like the movie. The closest I could find for $4.

I also Used a strobe light from walmart as my blue cell light.

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You can also see how I did a lot of this at my forum "My inexpensive Proton Pack for $100 me and my brother made...
Here


http://www.gbfans.com/community/viewtop ... =2&t=16449

You can view all my post about inexpensive props here...

http://www.gbfans.com/community/search. ... =egosearch
Thanks
#177549
Few general questions about my pack...

- What's the best adhesive? Hot glue didn't work out very well last year.

- Do any major retailers sell ribbon cables?

- I'm going for the silly string gun idea this year and using this gun (http://www.incrediblegifts.com/sillystringgun.html). I'm getting a bike handle tomorrow and putting it over some PVC pipe, all I have to worry about is attaching it to the gun as well as a makeshift holster, I think that will be my biggest feat.
#177597
My pack construction is hovering around 50 - 60% complete. Basically, tonight and tomorrow night are the final push. I'd love to post pics, but my home computer had it's brain torn out by a virus last week, so I'm posting from work/school.

Downside: it might be raining here on friday, which ruins my plan to go to my campus in costume and throw candy at people :(
#178978
lostdreamachine wrote:Few general questions about my pack...

- What's the best adhesive? Hot glue didn't work out very well last year.

- Do any major retailers sell ribbon cables?

- I'm going for the silly string gun idea this year and using this gun (http://www.incrediblegifts.com/sillystringgun.html). I'm getting a bike handle tomorrow and putting it over some PVC pipe, all I have to worry about is attaching it to the gun as well as a makeshift holster, I think that will be my biggest feat.

Depends on what you're trying to get stuff to adhere to. For general purpouse stuff, I haven't used it, but I suspect epoxy is the best way to go for a super strong bond on a variety of surfaces. If you've got say an MDF motherboard and you wanna attach a bunch of stuff to that and you can't attach all the stuff together first and then use brackets like a real pack, then epoxy seems like it would hold that stuff tight and not let go.

On my temp pack though I just used gorilla tape to hold everyhting in place. Put the tape on the inside and bent it over to contact the motherboard. Worked great and held pretty well for weeks but eventually fell apart.
#188255
Just saw this thread and had posted mine elsewhere. But images of my kids quick build are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmarsdesig ... 664830156/

And as I am new here, my intro to this is here: http://www.gbfans.com/community/viewtop ... =17482&e=0

Be Grymm

~Doctor Grymm
http://www.DrGrymmLaboratories.com
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By Gareee
#264067
Dr. Rockso wrote:Have lots of hot glue sticks lol
Hot glue sticks are BAD.
By Gareee
#264474
Filandrius wrote:I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, BAD?
No nutritional value. High in carbs. Taste worse than fried pickles. Not Gluten free.




.... and I hear they can give you kidney stones....
#264493
google "LED magic spinner" - these are a good source for cheap easy PKE meters, the more advanced propper can probably remove the ball part and put a more movie accurate rectangular case around the lights with a screen etc. these can be found anywhere, I found them in the halloween section at "Christmas Tree Shop" but they can usually be found year-round
By Gareee
#264611
Walmart carries them in the party section, and they are dirt cheap.
By lulu
#266198
This is great! I've been searching all over for a good costume for my ghostbusters-obsessed 5 year old for Halloween. All I can find for kids costumes is the exact same inflatable proton pack, retard costume on every google link

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We have our work cut out for us but it'll be worth it, thanks for this thread.
#266282
joeghostbuster wrote:google "LED magic spinner" - these are a good source for cheap easy PKE meters, the more advanced propper can probably remove the ball part and put a more movie accurate rectangular case around the lights with a screen etc. these can be found anywhere, I found them in the halloween section at "Christmas Tree Shop" but they can usually be found year-round
better yet, they'd work for a gigameter!
#328185
For the acrylic tube, the gun tip, I ended up using a clear acrylic clay roller (purchased at Michael's crafts store $5-10)

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It fit in the PVC perfectly. It looks clear as a window. Lucky find.

For the crank case knob, I found a reasonably sized round knob, from an old stereo I think, and put a small cork to simulate the knob on the knob! Like the cork in the picture below (available at most crafts stores).

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For the red lenses on the cyclotron, I found these on display as soon as I walked into Lowe's. The industry term is "driveway markers". Really cheap and the lenses pop out very easily for our purposes. Even better, you get 2 per marker.

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Also, for a light inside the gun, I used a Sylvania tap light. It has that blue-white LED glow. Anyway, I mounted it inside, on the bottom of the gun. You can either make the bottom of the gun removable or 'tap' it with something thin thru the top vents in the gun (not an option for me since I put some tissue paper inside the vents to diffuse the light a bit). The tap light I used, pictured below, has 3 settings 1, 2 or 3 lights for varying brightness. Really cheap and fits inside a gunbox perfectly.

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(On second glance, mine appears to be the one pictures above, but not sure if it's the 'dimmable' edition; we'll see when I get home). Same idea nonetheless.
#328250
KCghostbuster used those reflectors as well... he found them cheap in 2 packs at walmart, and they come in red, yellow, or blue. You just have to be careful cutting them, because they are very hard plastic which ends up with VERY sharp edges. You want gloves on while cutting those!
#328267
Hmm, the ones I happened upon just popped out of that white frame easily. I didn't end up making any changes to the circular red reflectors themselves; just glues them in place from within the cyclotron.
#332398
I found this shift knob last night in the Walmart auto aisle and thought it would make a very passable shock mount. It also unscrews to hide cash and secret items :)

$10 is probably more than you'd spend on washers and a carriage bolt, but I've always thought of the shock mount as the one real piece of bling on a pack!

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#338791
Just to piggy back off of the last post, I figured I'd give my cheap and easy shock mount idea.

All I did was take a piece of 1 1/4" shop vac hose that was lying around and put a piece of PVC inside of it to keep it stable and glued a single washer to the top and sprayed the whole thing with some Kryon Aluminum paint. It really looks pretty sweet and weighs next to nothing. I have a bolt in the center that actually runs through the shockmount, bumber, cyclotron, spacer and mobo, holding all of those in place with no need for any other screws/rivets.whatever. I'll post pics eventually of my build when I'm done. Just wanted to share because I don't think anyones tried that method before, and if you've got the stuff lying around the shop its the best bet IMHO.
By Gareee
#352296
ozmodiar5000 wrote:Been lurking these boards for years and I decided to finally make a quickie Halloween pack. Been really liking the ideas being thrown about here and currently working on a pack similar to Gareee's
Create a thread, so people can make recommendations as you put parts together, and good luck!

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