After doing all the work building a proton pack and upgrading the Hasbro Afterlife wand (still a few things to do); which can be seen here: My Proton Pack build (including Afterlife-to-1984 wand mod)
...I decided to start working on my old Matty Ghost Trap. So, I started with the pedal:
I remember when I first got it, I was impressed with the trap overall, but the pedal always annoyed me on a few points but the one that REALLY got me was the ribbon cable being a cast piece of plastic. Would that have been just too hard to add a ribbon with a couple of zip ties?
...so I started modding by collecting parts and disassembling:
I used a hacksaw to trip some of the old parts off:
I attached the VGA plug I got from Aliexpress to a ribbon cable, added two zip ties and already, the project looked promising!
Next was to remove the large relay piece. Looking through my greeblie box, I found a close-enough piece to work as the lower socket:
Found some long vintage screws in my box-of-things, made up some spacers and started assembling:
I put the new relay in place, added some vintage screws to the side of the box and replaced the sticker with a metallic one:
Next was to replace the gold-colored plastic pieces with actual brass. The various banjo pieces tend to be hard to find or expensive to source, I got a cheap piece of brass rod and started cutting with a hacksaw:
A little bit of file work on the corners, a vintage screw and old rubber tubing... getting closer to a realistic piece:
The other piece was a bit trickier since it has a hexagonal cross section, but some patient work with a file and some more vintage tubing created this:
Brass pieces in place:
I drilled some more holes on the side (you can see one drilled to counter-sink the old screws a little bit):
The attachment for the hose (instead of trying to replace with a real brass piece) I refinished using gold nail powder (see more on this technique here: Mando Armorer Helmet refinished using Nail Polish Powder!)
The finished product!
It's not a perfect replica by any means, but it still works and definitely looks more like a real-world item and not a toy.
Kind regards,
Magnoli
...I decided to start working on my old Matty Ghost Trap. So, I started with the pedal:
I remember when I first got it, I was impressed with the trap overall, but the pedal always annoyed me on a few points but the one that REALLY got me was the ribbon cable being a cast piece of plastic. Would that have been just too hard to add a ribbon with a couple of zip ties?
...so I started modding by collecting parts and disassembling:
I used a hacksaw to trip some of the old parts off:
I attached the VGA plug I got from Aliexpress to a ribbon cable, added two zip ties and already, the project looked promising!
Next was to remove the large relay piece. Looking through my greeblie box, I found a close-enough piece to work as the lower socket:
Found some long vintage screws in my box-of-things, made up some spacers and started assembling:
I put the new relay in place, added some vintage screws to the side of the box and replaced the sticker with a metallic one:
Next was to replace the gold-colored plastic pieces with actual brass. The various banjo pieces tend to be hard to find or expensive to source, I got a cheap piece of brass rod and started cutting with a hacksaw:
A little bit of file work on the corners, a vintage screw and old rubber tubing... getting closer to a realistic piece:
The other piece was a bit trickier since it has a hexagonal cross section, but some patient work with a file and some more vintage tubing created this:
Brass pieces in place:
I drilled some more holes on the side (you can see one drilled to counter-sink the old screws a little bit):
The attachment for the hose (instead of trying to replace with a real brass piece) I refinished using gold nail powder (see more on this technique here: Mando Armorer Helmet refinished using Nail Polish Powder!)
The finished product!
It's not a perfect replica by any means, but it still works and definitely looks more like a real-world item and not a toy.
Kind regards,
Magnoli
