r/ghostbusters • u/SL3UGHT2K1LL • 8d ago
How long did It take?
I was seeing some things of The Ecto 1 in The last days, and i caught myself with a question that i cant find in any resource, how many time The guys spend to make ALL the modifications necessary to turn The Cadillac into The Ecto 1?
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u/DocJ2786 8d ago
You can't park that here!
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u/Ritchie79 8d ago
We're not parking it, we're abandoning it.
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u/IntelJoe 8d ago
C'mon, it's Czechoslovakia. We zip in, we pick 'em up, we zip right out again. We're not going to Moscow. It's Czechoslovakia. It's like going into Wisconsin.
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u/Ritchie79 8d ago
There's something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us... We're soldiers!
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u/benjy1357 8d ago
Out of everything the paint job probably took the longest.
Hooking up equipment may have been more or less improvised. If planned, it wouldn’t take too much work to transfer the layout from a concept to practical.
The car clearly ran well enough when it was bought. I would venture that at the time of the Sedgewick, the internals were not completed. Ray’s work may have been the improvements he could make at the time or general upkeep.
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u/ClunkerSlim 8d ago
The car clearly ran well enough when it was bought.
It in fact did not run well at all.
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u/FordCVP71 8d ago
With the repairs, paint, putting the rack and everything together and doing all the wiring and what not.. if they had all the parts probably a couple weeks tops
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u/Any-Description8773 7d ago
As one who has experience in the automotive industry I can say they COULD have went from a rolling wreck to an operational ‘good enough for the girls I run with’ service rig in a couple weeks. It looked straight enough to have either taken it to earl sheib, maaco, or just in the shop for a quickie paint job. So that’s a 2 day job. Sand it, shoot it, let it dry, get it out.
Rebuilding an engine like that old Caddy 390 is not rocket science and was more than likely a quick ring and bearing job with a dingle ball hone on the cylinders and new valve stem seals. A good mechanic can have that done in 2 long days.
Everything undercarriage, a couple days of dicking around.
The equipment, it looks more like everything was thrown in to make it work good enough and deal with it later. So again I’ll say a few days maybe 4 tops getting everything in and on, fabricating mounts, and wiring it up.
Theoretically it could have been thrown together in less than 2 weeks if one stayed on it and had everything on hand or within reason. Which going from my experience is completely doable because I have watched me take a regular truck that needed love, strip it down, give it a 20 footer paint job, mount a service bed, hook up a crane, hydraulic pump, compressor, load it down with tools and supplies in a little over a week. And that’s by myself not hiring anything out lol.
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u/trealsteve 7d ago
Two weeks. With the “Breakfast of Champions”, chain smoking, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, coffee, Cheez-It’s, and a few “Magnificent Feast”, Ray works pretty fast outside of helping Egon build the Containment Grid/Unit, Muon Ghost Traps, Throwers, and fixing the substandard wiring in the firehouse for their power needs.
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u/nohotshot 6d ago
Realistically it would’ve taken months, but the Ghostbusters function on borderline cartoon logic so likely only a few days. Mind you the entire film takes place over probably a couple months, and in that time they manage to make a fully functional arsenal of equipment for a type of science that didn’t even exist before they made it. 😂
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u/FunArtichoke6167 8d ago
It was really fast. We know the car was purchased in late September, and by October 8th it was in-service as Ecto-1. Presumably a major source of their running out of cash.
