Changing the colour of an LED

[James Casey]

Hi all,

I have a Prophecy with a Violet Amethyst LED that I received as a prize in one of the raffles. I really like the hilt, but I have three violet blades now, and this seems like the easiest one to re-tune.

I've looked through a few topics, and it seems like just cutting out the resistor from the red wire would give me a pink blade. My daughter would love that - her Initiate is one of the violet ones, and she could dual-wield them, just like her dad

I've done some soldering before, and it was relatively easy, but it seems like the wire's so short and so wrapped in heat shrink I'll have trouble stripping them and using heat shrink. It seems like repairing the splice will use electrical tape, which I've done before and stands up fine.

However, if anyone can talk me through the process of changing the colour, I'd be grateful. If there's anything more complex then just cutting out the fairly obvious lump that seems to be the resistor, I don't want to get it wrong

If photos of my LED would be of any assistance, just let me know. I've not taken it out of the housing yet, as I need to check if I have the right allen key. If not I'll need to get one, so I guess step 1 in that case will be working out what size I need.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Darth Vapour]

Blue and red will still be purple, you need to resist the blue to get pink. Use between 5 and 15 ohm resistor, depending on the shade you want.

[Jiberias]

I've been thinking about this myself. My Graflex CE came in Blazing Red & I'd like to be able to change it to blue & back to red, (not on the fly) I don't mind getting into the guts to change it out. What I'd like to do is modify it to some type of easy disconnect & reconnect. Each change would require some disassembly so I would keep which ever color I was using at the time installed for a while. What are your thoughts? This is what your talking about doing, right?

[James Casey]

Mine would just be a permanent recolouring, although I like the idea of having a quick disconnect option to switch from Blazing Red to Consular Green to Guardian Blue... but in the Prophecy there's not a lot of room inside of the hilt to have those plugs hanging around.

Mine has three wires to the LED, a resistored wire to the red (presumably) and black and brown wires going elsewhere. I'll have to take it apart to see what it all adds up to - maybe one wire goes to the negative terminal for green? I really don't know that much about how these work.

Looking at the Emerald colour charts it looks like shades of pink can be achieved with red and a resistored blue... Maybe I can just desolder those two wires and switch them over. Anyone able to suggest if I'm on the right track?

[Jiberias]

Mine would just be a permanent recolouring, although I like the idea of having a quick disconnect option to switch from Blazing Red to Consular Green to Guardian Blue... but in the Prophecy there's not a lot of room inside of the hilt to have those plugs hanging around.

Mine has three wires to the LED, a resistored wire to the red (presumably) and black and brown wires going elsewhere. I'll have to take it apart to see what it all adds up to - maybe one wire goes to the negative terminal for green? I really don't know that much about how these work.

Looking at the Emerald colour charts it looks like shades of pink can be achieved with red and a resistored blue... Maybe I can just desolder those two wires and switch them over. Anyone able to suggest if I'm on the right track?

I can't say if your right or wrong with wiring. I was about to open mine up this evening just to have look inside & make some notes but I want to hammer out my sounds instead. There are some guys pretty much on top of the wiring in these sabers on the site. I'd trust them. Your bound to find a thread with great help on that.

[Darth Vapour]

The black is a common neg to all the led dies. The resistored lead is as you say to the red. The brown is presumably to the blue. You can test them by touch wiring from a battery pack to be sure. You will need to either des older or cut wires. Resolder the red with no resistor and the blue with a resistor. As I previously mentioned between 5 and 15 ohms. This is for a single Li ion setup. If you have a 4AAA setup then I presume there is another resistor in the circuit before it splits the blue and red leads, if so you should still be fine.

[James Casey]

I took mine apart today, so here's some photos:



Three wires - black and (preumably) resistored blue feeding off a single wire, and a separate red wire



Blue lead to R-, red lead to R+



Black leads to B-

So, swap over black and red and I might get somewhere? This is a stunt 'sabre, so just has 4 AAA batteries incidentally.

[Darth Vapour]

Ok, thanks for the photos.
Scratch what I said before. The red is a common positive.? The negatives are marked RGB. For pink you will need to have the blue resisted and not the red (you may need a 1 ohm to protect red depending on setup).

[James Casey]

Thanks, DV.

I got down to work with my soldering iron and swapped over the black and resistored blue wires. Took me about an hour and cost me a burnt finger, but I got there in the end.

I now have an interesting reddish-pink blade on my Prophecy, which complements my daughter's violet Initiate rather nicely It's not Hot Pink or Bane's Heart (I don't think, anyway. Could be Bane's Heart, but seems a bit dark) but I rather like it.

I'll post pics in the next couple of days. Thanks for your help!

[Jiberias]

Thanx for the info. I'm a bit more armed now for changing my red blade to blue. It seems it went easy for you. I hope mine does.

[Darth Vapour]

No problem. The first time I used  my soldering iron for a saber I didn't look and accidentally picked it up above the guard. Melted my skin onto the iron and severely burnt fingers. Worst pain I have ever felt. Won't ever happen again though.

[James Casey]

Thanx for the info. I'm a bit more armed now for changing my red blade to blue. It seems it went easy for you. I hope mine does.

Good luck! If I can do it, anyone should be able to - just take care around the hot end of the soldering iron

No problem. The first time I used  my soldering iron for a saber I didn't look and accidentally picked it up above the guard. Melted my skin onto the iron and severely burnt fingers. Worst pain I have ever felt. Won't ever happen again though.

Yeah, this is exactly what I did. I was being very careful, very careful indeed, but just split-second slip... Fortunately it was just a split-second, so with some cold water and antiseptic cream, I don't even have a blister - just a sore finger all last night!

[James Casey]

Finally got around to getting some photos of the re-wired blade:

Up close



In comparison to another of my Violet Amethyst blades, to show the difference from original to existing