Over the last three days my son and I each lost a blade tip while dueling in the evening. As many of you know fixing a lost blade tip is super easy, so no big deal.
However...I remember reading a few forum posts about people asking how they could get brighter tips on their US blades and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to experiment with the tip already off one of my blades. In the end I found the results interesting
The tip with the less blade depth on the left(son's, and an US older version) and the longer one on the right(mine, US new version) and the one I chose to meddle with.
Really I had no plan, just get the light in there somehow. So I marked the center of the reflective surface with a nail and taped off the rest to keep anything from coming loose or apart.
My thoughts were to drill a hole into the tip and let the LED light permeate the translucent material to help give it that extra glow. I started with a very small drill bit(1/16) to see what/if any effect it might have.
As I drilled through the middle my goal was to keep it slow and steady and try and keep as much debris pulled out as possible. I did this free handed and thankfully the hole I drilled was straight down the center. *phew* Of course being see through, the core I drilled out is visible from the outside of the blade tip. But keeping it straight and down the pipe reduces it's draw.
I did a pre fit as well just to make sure it looked ok installed in the blade. And if I felt that not enough light was getting in I could then remove it and try drilling a bigger hole.
I should note that I like the standard US blade tips and how they light up, but to experiment was a fun opportunity. I first lit up another regular MG blade with the standard tip for comparison. I believe I did a decent job of focusing the camera enough to capture what the tip looks like in person under normal circumstances. It's better lit than it appears here but still an accurate look:
And now for the regular MG blade with the modified tip: well...actual results.
It's illuminated and it looks cool. I used the same focusing techniques on this as with the standard blade/tip and it's as true to the camera as I can get.
In the picture below you can really see the light(SY) coming through the core and I think it's enough that I wouldn't drill it any bigger.
I'm kind of surprised at the results in that the blade tip doesn't look half bad with the drill line and it looks pretty nice how it lights up. It'll be nice having a blade with this kind of effect.
I won't be pulling the tips off of my other blades to do this and if a tip comes off another blade I'm not sure if ill do more yet. Maybe if I try a few different colors first to see what they look like. And I want to be sure I'm comfortable long term with the look of the core drilled out, but I can't see it being a big deal.
For a first try I like how it turned out
