About to visit family and had promised the littlest one a Vader hilt - but she's got siblings, so that means everyone needs to be armed. Brothers are big into Mega Man, so whipped up a couple of beam sabers. I'll be writing up the Z-Saber construction.
Putting to use an old Arctic Blue LED and UltraEdge midgrade blade - everything else is custom electronics, hardware, machined, or 3D-printed.
As usual with my budget builds, everything starts with a shop drawiing to figure out what lengths of pipe I'll need and dimensions of machined/printed parts.
With the Z-Saber a very short one-handed hilt, this build would be tight. I didn't want to use a smaller battery because:
1) It wouldn't be fair for one saber to die much earlier than the rest
2) I didn't want to mix chargers - the other two hilts are using 1000mA chargers, which would be a bit much for a 14500 cell - and I don't trust the kids to not mix up their chargers.
Thankfully, there was *just* enough space for all the electronics, so long as I went with a smaller speaker and a pommel-mounted charge port - which meant designing a custom pommel.
4" length of 1" thinwall polycarbonate tubing for the chassis, 20mm speaker leaves room for charge wires, 1" x 1" rebuilt BladeBuilder board, 18650 battery, with switch and LED wires running out the front. Chassis secures to the pommel, and the whole assembly slides into the hilt to be secured with screws and/or glue. I'd wind up re-using the design (with alternate pommels) for the Sigma beam sword and Vader lightsaber since Vader wound up with a similiar space limitation, and there wasn't time to design a new setup for Sigma.
Not quite the quality I'd want in my portfolio, but the kids should have fun:
And a group shot of all the in-progress hilts:
