Tag Archives: DIY

How to make a Fallout Vault-Tec jumpsuit belt in less than 12 hours

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For a convention last weekend, I was originally going to make a Boone costume to go with my modded Nerf sniper rifle with silencer and carbon fiber parts:

Unfortunately, my red beret didn’t ship in time, so I had to come up with something else to do. I remembered that I had bought a bunch of Vault Suit parts from Zook_one a while ago and hadn’t had time to do anything with them, so I thought I’d throw together a ghetto Vault-Tec suit in like 10 hours the night before the con. The belt turned out pretty good for being something I made with scraps of stuff I already had!

Tutorial after the cut!

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Extended range USB charger battery pack!

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Okay, so I could have just bought a OEM battery and a wall charger for my Blackberry 9630 and swapped out batteries when one went dead. Replacing a dead battery with a fresh one is all well and good when 1)you have the spare with you 2)it’s charged, and not the dead battery from when you swapped out batteries 4 hours ago, 3) you aren’t in the middle of running an app that can’t be shut down immediately, 4)you don’t mind waiting 3 minutes for the Blackberry to reboot. Here’s the problem I ran into: I went out on a full moon bike run with Mad FBC and started up Endomondo’s app with GPS tracking on my Blackberry. I wanted it to log the route we were taking since it was in the dark and all over Madison and I wanted to see on a map where we went. The trip itself took about 5 hours total and when we stopped for food or beer, I paused the Endomondo app. When the ride was over and I got back to my car, I only had a very very small sliver of battery life left. If I had stayed out 30 minutes longer, I’d be biking back to my car at 2am with a dead cel phone. I liked how the car charger would charge the battery while you were using the phone, so I decided to make a portable 12v charger to extend how long I can go without having to swap batteries or recharge my phone. I also won’t have to shut down and reboot it like I would with a battery swap. Here’s the parts:

1 female end cigarette lighter socket

2 4xAAA 6V battery holders

1 5v USB cigarette lighter charger

So the two AA battery holders are wired in series, so you have two 6V packs together to give you 12V. The cigarette lighter socket is wired to the battery packs, batteries are put in, and the whole thing is wrapped with electrical tape.

The green light on the white charger comes on when it’s plugged into the socket, so I know it’s at least wired correctly. I tested the battery pack out on my old Blackberry Pearl to make sure it wasn’t going to do anything unexpected on any of my good electronics. Everything works the way it should, although I don’t know exactly how much extra charge I’ll be able to get from this pack. It really depends on my Blackberry usage this weekend, since I won’t be turning on the GPS and I don’t suspect I’ll be playing a lot of MP3s or videos. The nice thing about this battery pack is that other people can get a quick charge off of it if they have their cable (I’ll have mini and micro USB cables with me), or I can go out on longer bike rides and track my ride with the GPS and be away from my car on a longer trip than 4-5 hours. We’ll be at Anime Central this weekend, and that will be a place where all the chargers for phones and cameras are left at the hotel and we won’t be coming back to pick up charged batteries for a while. It’ll be nice to see if I can find other uses for this thing! I also have a second cigarette lighter USB charger that has 2 USB ports on it, but that one is in my car. I might bring that one instead, but it’s much larger and I really like this flush mount white one.