Evolution of the Saber

Lightsaber Evolution

Taking a look at the parts of my saber and my current thoughts on it, I'm making a much simpler design than I first envisioned.  Below is a picture of my first concept for the lightsaber I am building.

The above saber came in at over 15 inches in length.  Compared to those seen in the movies, that's a massive saber - a double blade model should be that long.  So, I took out the choke and came up with my Mark II, pictured below.

Removing the choke brought the saber down by 2 inches for an overall length of 13 inches.  This model keeps the crystal chamber, but it is still a little on the long side for me.  The other issue is that wiring a crystal chamber on the Petit Crouton sound board requires relatively simple welds, but one is a very small weld.  The danger with this small weld is that I'm not that confident with my soldering skills (yet) to try that weld on my only board.  So, I've moved on to the Mark III model below.

Mark III has no crystal chamber.  I will design and build one, but I won't add it to the saber just yet.  Instead, this saber will have a compressible emitter plug to sit in place of the blade when not being used - it'll act as protection for the eyes when activated without a blade.  I was planning to add a blade shroud from the beginning and, now that Mark III is just over 10 inches, the shroud will not add too much in length to the saber.

Conceptualizing the Compression Plug

The compression plug is a bit of decoration for the blade when not in use.  When closed and secured in the emitter end of the saber, it will protect a users eyes from the light of the activated LED unit.  When unlocked, the compression plug expands to expose a core - this can be a crystal, or a plastic core that dissipates the light of the LED.  Basically, it's a neat safety device.

Taking some time this week, I sat down with the saber and a engineering pad, and drew up a design for the plug.  Below, you can see the rough design I came up with at the time.

 

While it looks big on paper, the truth is that this plug will be no more than 2 inches long and 1 inch in diameter.  To keep the compression plug from coming apart, it needs to be bolted together.  That leaves a minimum of 2 bolts to hold it and, probably, no more than 4 bolts.  More bolts can be used, but there is very little room for bolts to take up space in the plug.  I'm leaning, at this time, to make it work with a 3 bolt system.  I think 3 bolts in a triangular pattern holding the plug together will look more exotic.

Here's the picture of measuring the depth of the emitter.  I'm not sure you can read it, but the caliper reads 1.83 inches, which is 17/100 of an inch shorter than 2 inches.  I took another measurement that said that the distance from the end of the emitter to the opening of the 4 windows on the emitter is roughly 3/10 of an inch.  That means I want to make a plug that is more than 1.5 inches long when compressed and not much longer than 1.7 inches in length.  A plug 1.6 inches in length can have a core that is probably 1.25 inches long.  The big factor in the size of the core is the compression of the springs I'll be using in the plug.  I won't know the size of the springs until I've put the entire plug together.

I do know one thing, though: I'm probably not building a core out of Nylon.  Unless the core is very simple, Nylon is not going to be very useful in the core.  As you can see from the picture below, Nylon doesn't have a clean cut off when machined in the lathe.

Hopefully, by next week's blog, I will have machined both PEI and Acrylic so I know exactly which I'm going to use.

Feel free to send me your thoughts on this design.  Follow me on Twitter @jek_creations.

A Busy, Slow Week

Lathe in use…

Well, another slow week on the saber build.  The lathe has been busy with a piece of mystery metal that I brought back this summer.  The metal is non-metallic, gives off a kind of green corrosion, and is really heavy.  It could be stainless steel (but green is wrong for it's corrosion) or it could be monel.  At any rate, it has finally come off the lathe today.  After the lathe gets a thorough cleaning (remove all metal chips and old grease), is re-oiled and put back together, I'll be back to working the saber.  Here's what the lathe has looked like for the past week or two.

This piece of metal is heavy and, worse, slick.  It's heavy because it's a solid metal cylinder about 4.5 inches in diameter by about 6 or 7 inches in height.  I haven't measured it exactly because machining it isn't a precision (read to tolerance) job.  It was a somewhat ugly lump of metal that is now a shiny uniform piece of metal.

Concepts for the Saber

I'm thinking of modifying the saber so that it doesn't have the crystal chamber.  In part, adding the crystal chamber is cool, but the drawback to it is that I have to solder a very small solder join on the Petit Crouton sound board.  If I mess it up, I have to buy a new sound board, which is not cheap, so I may not add it to the saber.  I am, however, going to go ahead and build the crystal chamber because I may get brave enough and I'd have most of the work done.  So, in the next few weeks, I'll detail the work involved in making the chamber.

Whether I make the crystal chamber or not, I am making something cool to add to the saber: an emitter plug.  The concept is based on some work Rob Petkau did and showed in this video: Compressor Blade Plug.  First off, I can not stress how much I love Rob's work: Genesis Custom Sabers (his saber shop) is top notch from my point of view.  Anyway, when I saw that video, I knew I had to make one for my saber.  The good thing is that it can be used in place of the crystal chamber.

The key, I think, is in sourcing the right plastic.  Plastics have different uses and different qualities because of they are manufactured for those uses.  While sourcing plastic for this part, I'm looking mainly at the light transmission qualities and durability.  While there are very few plastics that are both brittle and translucent in the given size that may be needed, there are a few.  One such plastic is acrylic.  It is clear and easily machinable, but it can "explode" if not carefully machined - it shatters due to it's brittleness under stress.  I currently have to order some acrylic in the right size if I plan to use it in this project.

Two other plastics that I have and will work for this job are PEI and Nylon.  Here they are:

PEI (on the left) is a plastic that is used in relatively high temperature uses: I've heard that the stuff can survive a medical autoclave.  It is amber in color - I call that a German stout amber.  It is easily machined and, in my experience, very durable.  Aside from it's amber color and price, it is ideal for use near an LED that I've heard can melt hot glue.  Using a powerful LED similar to the LED in the saber, here's a picture of it's light transmission.

The other plastic (and the one used by Rob in his video) is Nylon.  We're all fairly familiar with Nylon.  It's major problem is that it is a little devil to machine.  The surface gets ugly when machined or, at least, the last time I machined it, I couldn't get it pretty to save my life.  I'm older and wiser now, and I like to think that I've learned some tricks over that time, so I'm going to give Nylon another go.  As you can see, it transmits light nicely.

Once I've completely serviced the lathe, I'll get some real work pictures up for you guys to enjoy.

Please, send me some comments or questions about anything you've seen done here.  Thank you for taking the time to read.

Twitter: jek_creations

Just a Small Job

Speaking of Speakers…

Despite having an extremely busy week, I was able to do a very small amount of work on my saber.  All I could get done was soldering the speaker.

Basically, all you need to wire up a speaker is wire, a speaker, a soldering iron, some solder, and some de-soldering braid (or a wire to perform the same function).  I generally use 2 colors of wire so that I can separate "positive" from "negative"; speakers work wired either way, but the board you connect to usually polarizes the speaker.  All "negative" and "positive" mean for a speaker is the flow of electricity and, generally unless marked, speakers don't have a polarity.  The speaker, in this case, is a 2watt speaker with a 28 millimeter diameter speaker.  The soldering iron is up to you for brand and type - I use a Weller with an adjustable power and a very narrow soldering tip (more on that when I solder the sound board).  It's important that you use a rosin core solder - usually 60/40 is what you find.  I include de-soldering braid because it helps fix small soldering mistakes - like turning wires around, etc.

 

It's a simple matter to solder the wires to the speaker.  On this speaker, there are 2 pads - one wire goes on one side as above and one wire…

…goes on the other side.  Perhaps, this isn't the best arrangement for the wires.  Since the speaker goes into a plastic casement inside the saber, it would probably be better to de-solder these wires from the speaker and turn them so that the wires pass over the center.

Now, to stress why this is the only work I've done on the saber this week.  First, it only just occurred to me that I wired the wires facing the "wrong" way.  Second, and more importantly, I hooked them up to my multimeter and tested for continuity, expecting them not to have continuity.  Anyone who knows about speakers knows that they are an electromagnet driven part (well, I knew that) and that an electromagnet works only by being a continuous stream of current, i.e. it has continuity.  Worried that I wired the speaker wrong or something, I de-soldered the wires and checked the pads for continuity.  They had continuity.  Suddenly, I remembered how a speaker works and could just kick myself for panicking over a properly functioning part.  I decided that I couldn't be trusted to work on the saber anymore this week (especially now that I've tripped or lost my balance twice around critical work in the shop and I just don't do that).

Having realized that I should wire the speaker slightly differently, the next two pictures are kind of funny.

Yep, that's the speaker encased in it's casement.  It's not impossible to remove from the casement, just a pain because I have to remove the speaker without damaging it.  This is how it goes together, though, which is what I wanted to show.  To make the speaker function out of the saber, I'm going to get some craft felt, snip an "X" in it, run the wires through it, and glue it to the back of the casement.

Needing rest…

I'm hoping that I can get more work done on the saber soon.  At the moment, I think I'm in need of some proper rest.  Lately, I'm making too many mistakes and taking too many missteps.  I'm not comfortable especially with tripping over things in a shop - there are power tools like table saws and things to run into and that's not an injury to get.

Tweeting on Twitter

I just joined some to the modern world recently - I joined Twitter.  If you'd like to follow me there, I'm jek_creations - all like that. 

Light on the Subject

Completed LED Wiring

Okay.  Sorry there are no pictures of the wiring process.  I wired the blade LED unit more on a spur of the moment kind of thing.  Basically, I needed a measurement for an emitter plug and decided that I might as well wire the LED while I was at it.  There would be pictures, but I didn't take the camera out with me that day, so you guys only get the finished product.

The LED is wired with each color die being independently wired rather than being in parallel or series.  This gives me the ability to take advantage of an additional color mixing board rather than one board running (essentially) one channel.

Anyway, here's what the LED unit looks like all set up to be put in the saber.

The unit is encapsulated in an aluminum cover (the gray part) that holds the focus crystal in front of the LED dies and a copper heat sink back that screws into the aluminum cover.  It's a sandwich: aluminum, then focus crystal, then LED board, then thermal tape (to allow thermal transfer to the copper), then the copper.  You may notice that the wires are paired and twisted.

I twist and pair wires when I wire a DC circuit.  To me, it keeps the wires tidy and makes sure that they go to the right places when wired to boards.

The part I'm sure you're interested in more than my wiring technique is whether they light up and what they look like.  Well, until I get the entire unit wired, you'll have to make due with pictures taken running off the diode test on my multimeter.  I'm pretty sure it's test mode is significantly dimmer than they will be wired as a unit.

Here's red.  Note that the multimeter actually says a voltage of 1.679.

Here's the green die.  The multimeter registers the voltage for it and the blue in the overload position - I guess they really want more power.

And finally blue.

Where to next?

From here, I have a bit more to do.  First, the measurement I took after making the LED unit is to make a safety plug for the emitter so that no one gets blinded by an accidental turn on of the saber.  The rumor is that these are close to Class 2 lasers when lit and I'm kinda attached to seeing things.

I'm also making a shroud for the saber.  There's also a whole process for making it look weathered.  The crystal chamber needs to be built and fleshed out.  All the internal wiring needs to be drawn up and wired and arranged in the saber.  I'm making a insulator for the internals so they won't short to the body.  And then, I'll probably have a complete saber.  At which point, I am thinking of making my first youtube video introducing my saber - we'll see (I don't really like how I sound on video :P).