DalaGStanator's Customs, Mods and Experiments

Finished. As I thought, the battery pack blends in well enough to look (99%) proportionate and provide decent support for the roof rack. Apart from some rotating dishes and a few other devices that should be where it is, it had room for most of the major details around it. The front antenna is a wire tie superglued into a hole so it wouldn't break off. I considered thickening the real light bar with tube pieces to match the dummy one, but (A) the effect didn't look as good since they aren't translucent enough and (B) only the tips of the LEDs fit in them and they kept falling off. I'm also unhappy with my attempts at drawing the No Ghost Sign since they all look too different, inaccurate and rushed.



The roof rack was drawn in sections and traced with the 3D pen, which was also used to make the side ladder by tracing the grid on a cutting mat. All parts were sanded to remove imperfections before painting, assembly and mounting. Saving the black and white filaments for last since my own paints tend to have nicer shades; most of the other colours look dull and don't match the ones shown on the box they came in. Likely because I traced the parts on a clear, flexible sheet, I found it easy to bend the ladder without need for a heat source.



Close ups on both sides showing the details more clearly. All that, and the screws and light switch can still be handled without breaking/warping anything. The green tube is intentionally flattened to make way for a screwdriver, and also shortened so it wouldn't block the light switch. To un/screw the PCB, the fan and T.U. antenna ("sniffer") have to be popped off to reveal the screw holding it down (though I have yet to try it because the light bar might stop working). Like the dummy light bar, the oxygen tanks are made from the same type of plastic tube, with a toothpick between them for support. A commutator from a DC motor represents the anti-collision strobe near the (fake) red light. For the small blue lights at the ends, I initially used more accurate hole punch pellets but replaced them with rings to make them less fragile. On the real unit/s made for the films, the blue tubes contained the wires for the light bars and everything else on the roof, which were powered from inside the vehicle. If I'd known their purpose when I made the chassis, they could've had the same function since I used real copper wires for them; ideally with connectors to make the battery pack removable.

Big thanks to Code 3 Garage for their super informative guide to every detail on the Ecto-1, which made this a lot easier for me to make and told me what the "weird gadgets" are for, what each one does and how to make or acquire it for models and full-sized replicas alike.