Ghostbusters: the Spirit Life-Size, Zap & Blast Mashup Wand

Finished Spirit Life-Size, Zap & Blast Mash-Up Wand

I wanted to have a neutrona wand that I could hand over to kids (and adults) when taking photos without being too worried that they would break it.

I asked around and a fellow Ghostbusters Virginia member was kind enough to give me his no-longer-needed Spirit Life-Size wand.

My first idea was simply to wire up the light inside and leave it at that.

Then I found out that the Hasbro Ghostbusters Zap & Blast Proton Blaster was on sale at Walmart. This little spud has a lot of sounds and functions, similar even to the Spengler / 1984 wands that cost $100 or more.

I was hoping to score it for $13 like some others, but I ended up having to pay $25 for it. Anywho…

Here’s how to integrate the electronics from your Zap & Blast into your spare Spirit Life-Size Neutrona Wand.

Zap and Blast

Other stuff you’ll need…

Parts & Materials

• Mini toggle switch
• Thin gauge wire (can use excess wire from Spirit wand if available)
• Heat shrink tube
• Three AAA or three AA battery pack
• Electrical tape

Tools

• Rotary tool (aka Dremel)
• Small drill bit
• Saw rotary bit
• Cutting rotary bit
• Hobby / small hand saw
• Wire cutters
• Wire stripper
• Soldering iron & solder
• Hot glue gun and glue

Optional

• Second mini toggle switch
• Super glue or other glue
• Hook-and-loop dots or strips

Electronics-wise, the Zap & Blast has:

• Activation button (also referred to here as ‘power up’, which triggers when you pull the front piece forward)
• Mode button and multicolor mode LED
• Some top button that they call ‘Charge’ that makes noises?
• A trigger “Intensify” button
• ‘Tip’ tube with lights (4 LEDs)

The Spirit wand has:

• On/off button (momentary)
• Slo-Blo / fire button (momentary)
• ‘Tip’ tube with single light

Inside, the Zap & Blast has:

• Mode button and LED board
• Main board
• Speaker
• 3 small boards, each with a momentary switch (activation, top, trigger)

Let’s see a photo of the Zap & Blast main board, with the wires labelled

Disassembling the Wands

Disassemble the Zap & Blast.

We’ll keep the clear and silver tubes from the mode switch.

Otherwise, this thing is a goner. I wouldn’t bother keeping the screws or anything safe.

Carefully disassemble the life-size wand. Keep the screws safe. You don’t need to take off the left-side activate / intensify box if you don’t plan on trying to put an “Intensify” switch inside of it.

Preparing Before Electronics

Mode Light Hole

Use a screwdriver / drill / dremel / whatever to pop the top ORANGE ‘button’ out of the top of the life-size wand.

Drill / cut through the ‘frame’ around the internal cube-like thing under the ‘button’. After you’re done, it should look something like this…

Mode Light Hole

Clean it up however much you want with a file or what have you, now or later.

Switch Holes

Here we’re going to make holes for the activation switch and an optional power switch.

Unscrew one or both of the two fake toggle switches above the buttons.

Use your rotary tool saw to cut the interior post(s) down and leave a nice hole for your toggle switch(es).

Mode Light Top

Use your saw (not your rotary saw, because ouch!) to saw off the top of the clear portion of the mode switch. We’re going to glue that above the Mode Light Hole later.

Speaker Holes

We’ll use our drill bit and rotary tool to drill some holes in between the ‘heat sink’ fins so that we can hear our speaker.

Since the speaker is likely going to be mounted towards the front handle of the wand, you’ll want to start towards there (1st or 2nd fin) and do holes between the next 3 or 4 more fins. Try to make your first and last columns shorter to account for the round shape of the speaker. I didn’t really do this, so do better than your teacher, rookie!

Tip Tube LEDs Channel

Use a rotary tool bit like the one pictured to expand the hole in the tip tube of the life-size wand which previously accommodated the single LED into a channel that will allow the Zap & Blast LED board to pass through. I intended to make the channel perpendicular to the mounting holes, but that didn’t work out. Do your own thing here!

Cuttin’ Wires

Before we go any further, we’ll cut wires on the life-size wand and on the Zap & Blast innards.

Life-Size Wand

1. Cut the gray wire which goes from the Spirit Life-Size wand’s black (on/off) switch to the red switch, at the red switch. This means you’ll have black and gray wires on the black switch and red and white wires on the red switch.
   See the photo later of life-size wand wiring to make sure you’re making the proper cut.
2. Cut the black, red, and white wires down to a manageable length. Something like 6–10 inches is probably good. Keep the excess wire to use later.
3. Keep the orange wires, which can be useful later.

Zap & Blast

Yellow ‘Power Up’ Wires

Cut the momentary switch off of the yellow wires (power up wires).

Cut the wires connected to the mode board’s SW+ and SW- pads (mine are blue and purple wires). Leave some lead on the wires, in case you somehow cut the wrong ones and need to reconnect them.

Cut the blue wires from the main board to the trigger switch.

Electronics (Part the First)

Before you do any soldering, remove the batteries.

The above is the general plan for wiring. You’re not going to do final wiring yet, but you do want to lengthen the wire run in several places to make things easier later.

Lengthening Wires

Lengthen the wires from

• Mode switch (blue/purple attached to the main board)
• On/off switch (gray wire attached to the Life-Size wand)

Adding Wires

Add wires to your toggle switch(es).

For the ‘activate’ switch, use yellow wire if possible, or your orange wire from the Life-Size scrap.

Optionally, for the ‘power’ (not ‘power up’) switch, use red wire if possible (I used extra from the wire cut off of the Life-Size switch wire run).

Mounting Stuff

Before we start mounting things, let’s see a photo of the finished ‘main’ mounting…

You’ll want to bend the wires out from the main board so that this configuration is as easy as possible to achieve.

• mode board wires at the ‘front’ of the main board, towards the large cavity of the wand
• tip LED wires at the ‘top’ of the main board, toward the ‘box’ side of the wand
• speaker wires at the ‘bottom’ of the main board, toward the ‘heat sink’ side of the wand

Heat ’em up! Get your glue gun warm and ready.

Mode Board

The mode board is the hardest piece to mount, since we have to do it from the top, so we’ll mount it first.

Noting that the wires must be facing ‘inward’ and not towards the shell of the wand, we’ll place the mode board with the LED facing down and as centered as possible in the mode light hole.

We’ll need to hold the board in place as we flip the wand over. With the other other hand, use your glue gun to glue the board in from the top. Keep the board pushing against the top and side of the inside as much as possible.

You’ll need to hold it in place until the glue dries enough to do that for you. The LED is plenty bright to shine through the glue, so don’t worry about that.

When dry enough, flip the wand back over and glue down along the side of the wand, where it meets with the mode board. Just dump as much glue on there as you think might be needed. I think I only glued that one side down. You’ll also have to hold this while it cools.

Main Board

The main board mounts on top of a screw, between the big cavity in the top of the wand and the handle.

Before you go any further, you’ll need to make sure that screw can’t short out the board. Put some electrical tape on top of the screw.

Just dump hot glue down the four corner mounting holes in the main board. It isn’t conductive, so we don’t have to worry about shorting it with the glue. You’ll have to hold it down while it cools for the first one or two corners.

Speaker

The speaker is easy to mount. Just dump down hot glue between it and the side ‘wall’ and then glue down the other side.

Battery Pack

I mounted my battery pack ‘tall’, with the main portion facing towards the outside, on the opposite side to the speaker (‘box’ side).

To make it easier to remove and remount, I used hook-and-loop dots that I had around.

Tip Tube Assembly

For the tip tube, we’ll slide the LED board through the channel we cut earlier, inserting the outer silver tube from the Mode Switch into the front of the tube. We’ll fit the front of the LED board with the forward LED into the inside of the silver tube and position the silver switch tube just forward of the tip tube’s first silver ‘ring’.

To actually get it attached to the wand, we’ll need to cut the post which goes through the mounting holes. This photo shows it cut down, but not quite short enough. Use your rotary or other tool to shave it down just a little bit if you need to.

Tip Tube Mounting

Here is a photo of the mounted tip tube.

Yep, that’s mounted. You’ll have hot glued the ever-lovin’ snot out of it, but CAREFULLY making sure that it will still close at the end of the process.

Mode Light Switch Cover

The last assembly bit you’ll do is to glue the mode light cover on top of the mode light hole.

Clean up any excess hot glue on top of the wand and glue that thing down.

Electronics (Part the Second)

Before you do any soldering, remove the batteries.

Finished wiring inside the case…

The general steps for attaching the switch wiring to the main board is:

1. Slip some heat shrink tube over one of the wires
2. Twist the wires together so that the exposed wire is between the two insulated pieces of wire. If the exposed wire is twisted perpendicular to the insulated wire, you won’t be able to get your heat shrink tubing over the exposed wiring.
3. Solder the exposed wire together.
4. Slide / push the heat shrink tubing over the exposed wire.
5. Use a heat gun or the tip of your hot glue gun to shrink the tubing. (I do this step after all of the soldering is complete.

Once again, here is the general wiring diagram:

Step 1: Mode Switch

From the Spirit Life-Size wand’s black (on/off) switch …
on the left when you’re looking down at the top of the wand…
red and white wires to the wires attached to the blue/purple mode switch wires when you lengthened those.

In the below photos, this will be the black wires on the wand connected to the white wires on the electronics.

Step 2: Intensify Switch

From the Life-Size wand’s red (slo-blo) switch …
on the right when you’re looking down at the top of the wand…
to the blue trigger wires.

In the below photos, this will be the black and gray wires from the wand to the yellow wires from the electronics.

If you want to try to put an INTENSIFY switch in the left-hand box instead of reusing this switch … go with Gozer. I didn’t want to try.

Step 3: Power / Activate Switches

From the new toggle switch above the slow-blo button, to the yellow power up wires. You may also be connecting a second toggle switch between the red wires of the battery pack and the red wire of the electronics.
The battery switch would be the ‘bottom’ one and the activate switch would be the ‘top’ one.

Test It.

Before you close the Life-Size wand up, you should put the batteries in and bench test your wiring.

Close It Up

Make sure that if the battery pack has an on/off switch that it is left in the on position.

Now that you’re all wired and switched on, close up the case and screw it together.

Test It.

Bust some ghosts!