The plan:
Turn this
Into this
Why? Because I wanted a silver Reaper. Because I wanted to see if I could. And because no one else had done it and I'm a smug a-hole
So I bought my very first Reaper.
Just as a bit of a side note: Before I bought this hilt, I honestly thought it was stupid and goofy looking. Once I took it out of the box though, it shot up high on my favorites list. I fell in love with this hilt when I started wielding it and spinning it. Also once I started gutting it and looking at it from so many angles I started to see the myriad of modifications and builds you could do with a Reaper. I honestly have about 10 more Reaper ideas and am probably going to go stupid next time there is a flash sale on this hilt.
First I had to remove the anodizing. This was the quick part. 20-30 minutes all told. The hard work and the hand cramps were yet to come!
Then paint the entire hilt, emitter and emitter shroud, pommel ring, claws and collar black and then get to sanding so all the high spots were sanded back to silver, and the black stayed in the engravings.
There are no progress pictures of this because it was many, many hours of sanding. I lost count but it was somewhere between 8-10 hours of hand sanding working my way up from 600 grit, to 3000 grit to get this mirror finish.
I made the switch silver about halfway through the build instead of black so I could do a silver switch/black bezel and a black covertec/silver screw just to keep the black and silver jumping out on top of each other through the whole build.
And for those curious, I consider this a "light side" hilt and had it built with the finished colors I had planned for it. So this hilt has V4 sound, Guardian Blue blade and Violet Amethyst Flash on Clash.
It is hard to see in these pictures, but the windows of the emitter are black just like in my "plan" picture. The objective was to make anything silver, black, and anything black into silver. With one exception. On a standard Reaper the crown shaped machining on the emitter shroud is black on black, but I wanted mine to stand out more, so I left it contrasting in the same way as the rest of the low spots on the hilt.
And the end result?
This turned out to be my favorite saber mod that I've done to date and because of that, it became a shelf queen so I didn't drop it and destroy the hours and hours of work. I plan on buying another standard Reaper to replace it as an "active" saber so I have one for dueling.