Who missed me? I missed you guys. ;P

Anyway, with the hype of GhostBusters Three had gotten me and a friend riled up and we're putting thoughts to our own Ecto-Mobile.

Right now we're in the planning stages for things.

Research, equipment, law reading, and Flightsuit creation. (I need to make a new one for myself :B)

Anyway. We've decided that our car might possibly be a Dodge Magnum. Nothing fancy added to it, the cheapest Magnum we could find would suffice.

But like I said, things are in the planning stages. I need to move back to New York, get my job and college ready and my license too. (Too lazy to have gotten it before).

But if you guys have any ideas on how we should go about doing this, toss 'em in! I really want support and input. It would help a lot.

If you have been too lazy to get a drivers license, then you are in for quite an adventure in building a quality ectomobile conversion.

Get your priorities in order - Drivers license first, ectomobile later… lol

All Intensions on that, Lol.

However it would be a little more organized on while I get my license, I research the parts/laws I can use/follow for building this Ecto, no?

While I can get my license, my friend can look into deals on a Magnum while also digging through some lightbars and parts for the roofing of this Ecto.


I also noticed you were an SA Goon, Boomer.

Haha, were?

I still am.

I think they forgot to ban me.

Oh well!

Best of luck to you with the magnum… I haven't been able to find any for less than about $18,000, and you could get a much more enjoyable car than a magnum for that amount of money (the windows are sooo small!).

Also, be mindful the rearward-sloping roof when you build your rack.

To me, the magnum was an interesting idea, but would be a nightmare in practice to actually modify… Might I suggest a Outback

I suggested an older station wagon.

We're still looking into it. the Magnum is up there, but it's not confirmed. I'll try and update this topic as much as possible. For being 18, I get a pretty good paycheck of $200+ So it shouldn't be that hard with no bills to pay with equipment.

So if anything, I may find the sizes I need, buy the equipment; then the car last.

Well, if I may…

My first car, and the car I converted into an ecto, was a 1998 Subaru Outback.



You can find these older cars, often completely refurbished, for kess than $5000 on craigslist.com 1997-1999 models will give you a station wagon that is more of an adventuremobile than a grocery-getter, and will have curves and style in all the right places (as opposed to a heavy-set and problematic taurus wagon or the like).

All-wheel drive on all models, they are generally very quick and powerful, adding on all the roofrack equipment has minimal effect on their performance. I loved my old Outback so much, it really was the perfect car for a young college student who loved to haul his friends and all his nerdy stuff around.

It'd warm my heart to see another ecto-outback on the roads!

Edit: Oh, and my entire conversion cost about $1,500 dollars, and that is a low estimate. Lightbars will be the most expensive, with PVC coming in a close second (depending on the size of your tubes). Graphics were about $150 for us, including three large vinyl logos, the stripes, and the lettering.

Ah.

Thanks for the help man, we really appreciate it.

I actually work in Home Depot; so if I need any consultation on which tubing or pipes to use, I can just ask my friends that work there.


(Also Discounts are wonders. )

One more thing, what other stuff did you add ontop of your Ecto? I mean I can always head to the junkyard and find a satellite dish for the top, but what aboyut the other stuff? The Light bars are a given.

In other news:
We may decide on this Volvo..

Some_Guy
In other news:
We may decide on this Volvo..

Volvo sounds nice… a littly boxy but it will certainly get the job done.

The goal of my car is to keep it 100% removable (no impact on the car), and light. Most oxygen tanks and junkyard stuff we found was cool, but was way way way too heavy. I actually got my satellite dish off of ebay brand-new for $30.

Our rack is a wooden box with pvc frames bolted to each of it's sides. On one side there is a large… I think it's a 6-inch diameter pvc tube that is capped off on either ends. On the other side are four plastic food containers we got at wal-mart, bolted together in pairs. Under the two tanks on the left side is the faceplate of an old tank multimeter we got at an army surplus store… wasn't really worth it. On the front there is a pvc drain, an electrical switchbox casing (both from home depot), and an old oscilliscope screen we got at CSU science department surplus. On the back are two trashcans bolted together to form a tank…

I'll post detailed pics of the rack when I get home…

Indeed. Too heavy would cause the roof to decay and cave, as well on sharp turns; to flip over.

I will check autopart yards for things, even when I'm on break at work this saturday. I work at a new Home Depot; so everything is freshly stocked. I'll give it a run through quickly and take time in later visits to narrow peices down to the right or exact ones we needed.

We've already decided that the step ladder on the side could be bothersome, so we're nixing it. We're going for a more newer version of an Ecto. Like a real Extreme Ghostbusters or something. Not sure yet.

We nixed the ladder when we first drove around Old Town, people trying to get into the car, so much as trying to climb through the windows… there's nothing to stop a drunk from running up and jumping on your ladder? *taps nose*

The ecto-1k came out as good as it did because we focused on making the car look as though it were the original choice for the Ghostbusters.


I mean, alot of people go through a lot of work to make their wagon or van or whatever look like a cadillac MM combo. We basically went with an attitude of creating the design around the base car…

You'll find interesting things at junkyards but odds are they will be incredibly heavy. We went to every scrapyard on the front range and we didn't find anything that wasn't rusted through or weighed less than fifty pounds.

I found that the easiest thing to do was to find an object and disguise it as something else. Even people who get a close look won't know the difference.


This is a decent image of the rack right after we rolled the car out. I've added a LOT since then, but this is a good core idea of what's on it.

For fiddlybits, the stuff I could never find in junkyards, I used electrical junction boxes, sometimes called zip boxes.



I bloody love these things. You can find them in your electrical aisle at home depot. Paint easily sticks to the non-smooth ones, they come in a variety of sizes and lengths, and they look very mechanical. Dremmel off some edges or whatever bits you don't like. I have one on the front of the rack, two on either side of the dish, out of which come my two blue hoses.

The hoses are simple pool hoses from Home Depot. These are about $4 a foot, which can cost a lot if you don't measure right. I tried for the longest time to get them to curve into the pvc cap which I was then going to bolt to a magnet like this


but they refused to curve.

Ecto96 solved this by simply running a bolt through his pipes into his magnets.


but I figured I could just make the curve by sticking the tubes into some elbow pvc pieces, attaching a cap to those elbows, and bolting the cap. End result:


In the end, a whooole lot of the stuff on my rack is plastic, which makes it cheap, light, and weatherproof. My rack weighs in the neighborhood of 100lbs, and it is held on with industrial zipties. They have endured speeds of 105mph, temperatures below zero wet and dry, and are easy to remove/reapply.