Very Nice. I'm all about the Zipties. High School Robotics Team; we must've gone through at least 5,000 zipties a YEAR.

Anyway, That's a great explination on things, and the little knicknacks you got ont he roof (Even if some of the images don't allow hotlinking, lol)

I get paid today, so I might roam about the aisles glancing through things in plumbing and electrical.

I found a Law Enforcement forum and I'm going to ask about what is allowed and what is now allowed on my Ecto.

..if my username will activate anyway.

Boomerjinks
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.

You may want to find another place to host your images. These are the most popular ones.

http://www.photobucket.com/
http://www.imageshack.com/
http://www.flickr.com/

Grrr… they were working fine last night.


Roofrack


Hoses

Some_Guy
I found a Law Enforcement forum and I'm going to ask about what is allowed and what is now allowed on my Ecto.

Trust me, you really really are better off going down to your local police services and asking individual LOCAL officers. Go to your local state patrol station and ask questions. Whoever you talk to, get their card because if you do get in trouble, you can tell the cop you're in trouble with who gave you your information…

Ah, but that's the good thing about this forum.

In this “Ask a Cop?” Thread ONLY Police Officers/Law Enforcement Officers are allowed to reply. If anyone else does but the original poster and police officers; they're banned. So it still works. If I dont get a straight answer, then I'll head down to the Station.

Great pics, by the way. I was planning on rummaging through eBay today for some interesting peices of hardware. Like the dish, maybe some little screen to put in the dash for fun. I found on eBay last night the switchboard for lightbars, I was considering that too.

I'm pretty good friends with the guy at Kaufman's Army/Navy on 42nd Street in New York, so I'm going to head there for my flightsuit webbelt and maybe some old junk parts; considering they gave clothes/supplies for the filming of Ghostbusters 2.

Edit - I'm also considering on finding some smaller LED scroll lights. For wording and stuff? Just to say like “Long Island Ghostbusters”. I can ask my old guitar teacher where he got his; or if I can buy it off of him.

Whatever you do, make sure you get contact information from the officers you talk to, that way there is at least some accountability.

As for scrolling LED bars, the cheapest I've seen are about $160 ea. for 26" signs. I've been considering getting some, but there is likely a law about the signs being a distraction on the road, though supposedly any lights that do not face forward are fine…

The big issue is going through the trouble of waterproofing those signs so that I don't have to remove them every time it rains, or every time I chance to drive through a puddle.

I am sort of leaning towards them not being with the cost.

Our lights are mounted inside the dashboard, just below the cd player… Check my Ecto-1K forum for more pictures.

Yeah..with all the crazy weather lately, maybe the scrolling LEDs are a bad idea. I've been looking through eBay for the past hour through some stuff, I found some dishes, and some more light switch boxes, but I'm just browsing until I can find a good affordable one.

Also, what kind of things should go on the roof rack without overload; the side tanks, the back tanks, the dish, and the red “Ghost Sniffer” are a given; anything else? We've got a lot of roof on ours.

Edit - What about that siren? Whatif I rigged the box output to have an opening for a speaker; or make a housing of the speaker to look like the classic 1959 siren casing; with the switches/audio playable from the inside?

I wonder if that'll work.

Edit Edit - Would this work?

Well it's a lot different for us. We're in Colorado where there is almost zero humidity, so we can get away with lots of stuff.

Our siren is a pair of normal PC speakers, tucked behind the front lightbars.
They are hooked to a discman which allows us to play anything we can burn to a disc. It has worked perfectly for the siren and adequately for music. And we haven't had any problems with weather. The speakers have been covered with more than two feet of snow, I even powerwashed them in sub-zero temperatures, they work fine…

I stayed away from those horns because all the ones we tried has such a tinny, crass sound. Plus the wiring, amping, and recievering went against our goal of cheap, quality, and ‘non-permanent’.

Our original plan was to rig an amp inside the main box and hide marine speakers behind the tubes. This is still on the dockett, but we've opted to not put anything on top of the car that people would like to steal.

Putting anything inside your box is going to be tricky because you live near the coast. This means that any water that gets inside your rack will condensate and possibly rot everything from the inside out. We completely sealed our box to prevent this sort of thing.

When we transfered the rack from my wrecked car to the new Outback, we found that my new car is slightly longer than the old one. Due to the size differences, I have debated rebuilding the rack from the ground up, changing the dimension, making it bigger and better. If I do decide to do that, I'll probably go through the trouble of installing the marine speakers. But really, what we have is adequate for our uses with the car, and we don't run the risk of breaking a noise ordinance law.

Well I might just use the siren for parties, Halloween, etc.

So I was thinking that we could have it removeable and keep it inside of the Mobile itself, like the glove box or something and drill a magnet to the bottom, so when we need it, just slap it on the roof.

I'm pretty sure the most we'll be doing is 65-70mph if the car will even run that fast. I highly doubt we'll be taking it out on the highway; so as to not have to worry if it gets blown away. So with that, the most we should be going is maybe 35, 45 tops?

I was thinking of adding that giant attenae like in GB2, but secured FIRMLY to the back of the car; so it doesn't do that whiplash like on that turn in the movie.

I'm also wondering about all the other useless knickknacks on the roofing.

Some_Guy
I'm also wondering about all the other useless knickknacks on the roofing.

We leave our speakers up on top all the time, running music occasionally through Old Town, or the siren when we leave a gas station. You'll get a LOT of people telling you “hey man, you should have the song!” and then you can surprise them by playing it.

Remember that if it is removable, it's stealable. That's why we didn't go with magnet logos on the car, and our speakers are sort of hidden behind the front lightbar and in front of the rack.

Our rack is tested at speeds of 105mph or so. Austin and I were driving home from Greeley on I-25 travelling at 85mph with headwinds of about 40, and nothing came off. We had to re-tighten the bolts on the dish's adjustment hinge, though.

This varies from person to person, but for me (and the guys that helped me build the car), two yellow tanks on one side with a longer tank on the other, the red binocs, the white and red sonobouy thing, the pair of blue hoses, a long-ass antenna somewhere on the car, and the satellite dish are all the most recognizable things about the Ectomobile. So long as you have them in some form or another, people will get a kick. Then you can start adding all the sciencey-looking gear you want.

Some_Guy
I'm also wondering about all the other useless knickknacks on the roofing.

We leave our speakers up on top all the time, running music occasionally through Old Town, or the siren when we leave a gas station. You'll get a LOT of people telling you “hey man, you should have the song!” and then you can surprise them by playing it.

Remember that if it is removable, it's stealable. That's why we didn't go with magnet logos on the car, and our speakers are sort of hidden behind the front lightbar and in front of the rack.

Our rack is tested at speeds of 105mph or so. Austin and I were driving home from Greeley on I-25 travelling at 85mph with headwinds of about 40, and nothing came off. We had to re-tighten the bolts on the dish's adjustment hinge, though.

This varies from person to person, but for me (and the guys that helped me build the car), two yellow tanks on one side with a longer tank on the other, the red binocs, the white and red sonobouy thing, the pair of blue hoses, a long-ass antenna somewhere on the car, and the satellite dish are all the most recognizable things about the Ectomobile. So long as you have them in some form or another, people will get a kick. Then you can start adding all the sciencey-looking gear you want.

It was important for me to make the car look cool from all angles. I wanted there to be enough interesting gear on each side for a person looking at it for the first time to not really be able to take it all in. Originally the left side of the car was known as the “hero” side because it had the quad tanks, the hoses, the binocs, and the other side just had a big long tank. Recently I hunkered down and build the white and red sonobouy and attached it to the right rack, adding interest to the rear and right side. I also added a funny little paintball canister.


And there is still more to come.