The proton pack from 1984’s Ghostbusters has been an obsession of mine since the day I built my first pack replica back in ’87. While the original pack is my favorite, I have to concede to building the Ghostbusters II version, which is not really that different anyway.
I started with the Cyclotron base since it’s the most recognizable part to me. I thought that the hardest part was going to be the round curves but it turned out to be the facets along the bottom. It took me two attempts to get it right, the first time I cut the facets from the top and bottom before gluing in the walls. That was a very bad idea since I did not cut them properly so they did not line up. I decided to start from scratch on the second attempt but keeping the round edges until I glued in the facet walls then use the edge trimmer bit on my router to shape the top and bottom properly.
I glued in spacers to take the stress off the walls of the Cyclotron thereby reducing the risk of the entire thing falling apart during sanding and trimming. I also thought of adding dowels to use as alignment guides but for some reason they did not line up and proved to be unnecessary anyway.
I made the gun mount out of 1/8 inch stock aluminum. It took 4 layers to get the right height of the base (not pictured) and main clip and used epoxy to bond the two clip layers together and the two base layers. Instead of gluing the clip to the base I tapped the base to fit 2 screws I found in my box-o-screws. The ends of the screws stick out ½ or more which should be enough to bolt into the gun mount box when I build it. If not I will look for longer screws with the same diameter and thread count.
The Cyclotron light washers were made out of 1/8 inch MDF. I had originally decided to make one of each size then I would make a mold and duplicate them in resin. In the end I just made all 4 in MDF.
In the reference photos you can clearly see that the ribs on all of the boxes are contoured at the top and not sharp 90 degree angled. To create the ribs, I took a piece of 1/4 inch MDF and cut a curve on the butt with a round bit on my router table. I carefully cut just the curve off and glued it to 2 1/8 pieces of MDF that are set at a 90 degree angle. Then I simply cut the ribs on my table saw.
