The original "blueprint"
I did some research into the subject and discovered rather quickly that there is an entire community of people online that construct Proton Packs and other such things of the Ghostbustin' nature. After I collected schematics and blueprints, pictures of other people's finished costumes, and amassed a pile of miscellaneous parts and wires in a corner of my room I began my work.
I started with the basic shape of the thing. The piece of metal in the above picture was merely there to help me conceptualize it and was not used in the finished product.
Here we start to see the pack coming together. Luckily, I had an old HP desktop computer in my basement, which lent its wires and power supply quite generously. The cyclotron (black circular thing on the bottom) was made out of a to-go container. I measured the circles and cut them out using an x-acto knife, sanded the rough edges, and glued red safety reflectors behind them. I felt that the cardboard housing above the cyclotron was too big, so I eventually resized and cut it down.
Allow me to skip forward a bit. The stages before the above picture involved minute changes here and there. Moving pieces around, finding ones that fit better, and hot gluing them to plywood that I picked up at a craft store and cut down to size. I was surprised to find that spray painting everything made it all so much more convincing. It hid the true identities of all the pieces used. After spraying the finish on, I set to work attaching the details (the wires and safety stickers). I feel it looks pretty awesome. Sure it isn't "screen accurate" but dammit if I'm not proud of the way it looks.
