Hello,
Here is the finished product:
I first bought the Archon v2.1 CG FOC AS because i loved luke's lightsaber in rotj and also do a lot of dueling. My first modification on it was to do the classic gold/bronze spray paint on the emitter extension piece. After a while i started wanting to make it more film accurate, but with research i realized that film accuracy wasn't going to be easy since the original hilt in the film was custom built rather than assembled from everyday items like the earlier sabers, and had several significant differences one being the neck thickness. At this point i decided i wanted to customize it to be my personalized saber from top to bottom.
GRAFLEX CLAMP
Another aspect of lightsabers that i felt just too classic to pass up was the activation boxes/clamp on boxes that all the sabers in the original trilogy had. I went ahead and ordered a graflex clamp replica (not mentioning where from since who cares anyway) and was able to get it to fit after some extreme loosening. I did not decide to re route the activation switch to the clamp because i liked having the AV switch button as a greeble anyway. I found a piece of old computer networking equipment and used part of the housing as the clamp switch since it looked about right.
WEATHERING
I took some higher grit sand paper and folded it into about a half inch by 4 inch strip then wrapped it around the neck and twisted back and forth producing moderate friction until the powder coating started to come off but not completely reveal the aluminum. i went ahead and also sanded out some of the powder coated sections on the pommel as well for evenness.
COLOR CHANGE
After deciding to just make a saber i would really love for myself i discovered the Photon blade. This posed a couple obstacles since i had bought the Archon a couple years earlier and it had a CG FOC LED setup, and to activate the full potential of the photon green blade the led color needs to be blue. Initially i was going to buy a new LED and change it out but one night i decided to take it apart and that was when i realized that the LED ENGIN in my saber was already an RBGW LED and i ended up being able to just solder straight from the green Die leads to the blue Die leads and once positive and negative were connected it supplied power to the guardian blue as well which mixed to create Arctic Blue. Everything worked great!
Before:
After:
With photon blade:
RESULT
In the end i had the Saber of my dreams with awesome blade brightness and a much more detailed looking hilt. The total added cost for the photon blade and graflex clamp was about $100 after shipping was all said and done so not incredibly cheap but worth it to buy over time. I've dueled with it a couple times since and it holds up perfectly. Overall completely satisfied.
NEXT
The only other modification i am considering is to add a dimmable buck puck with the flashing RGB LEDS inside for the blade shimmer/flicker effect. I added that to my Dark apprentice v4 and it was actually extremely easy but i may post more on that in a different post so i'll wrap up here.
Thanks for reading, i am pretty excited about the modifications so i would love to answer any questions or offer assistance if this is something you might be interested in.
Thanks
