I know what you’re thinking – another post about lightsabers? Well, this will be the last one, for a while at least. Consider it a bookend to this post.
In this week’s TotW you get to see what my lightsaber looks like. I can’t remember exactly when I built it but it was around the same time as the trainer saber. Just as before, I thought through exactly what features I’d want and where I’d want them placed. After all, a lightsaber is a personal thing – not in the sense that it is secret but that it is intended for one person’s use.
I won’t go through all the details as they have been explained in the other saber posts. I will mention that this one does have a functional button that turns the custom blue-green LED on. It is powered by a super-compact battery pack out of some random broken electronics that is stored in the base of the hilt.
Unlike the trainer saber, I never finished this one completely. You’ll notice a hole around the power button and a blank bump in the left side of the hilt. The power button hole was to have a custom black rubber piece to seal it and then be covered by another piece of chromed tube. This would have sealed up the hole nicely, given the saber a waterproof look and added a cool black line in some type of pattern around the power button. I was thinking of something like the pin striping on a custom painted hot rod or motorcycle – something with a dynamic shape. The bump was to have a pop-up twist knob for blade length adjustment drilled into it. My thinking was that adjusting the length of the blade easily based on the fighting environment would be a handy feature. How cool would it be to have a claymore-length lightsaber to berserker with in a big open field?
The same limitations from the trainer saber popped up here. I didn’t have access to a lot of tools so I had to use a lot of existing parts. I managed to get the overall shape almost exactly like I wanted it, but not with the level of detail. If I had been able to use a metal lathe to make these parts I could have increased the thickness of the parts allowing for a more exaggerated profile that would have been much more interesting. For example, the emitter shroud is the same diameter plumbing tube as the body of the hilt. I think it would look much nicer if the emitter could be a larger diameter.
I’ve been sketching saber designs on and off for years and, besides Obi-Wan’s Ep. IV saber, this is my favorite one. I’m happy with the way it turned out. Maybe one day I’ll remake it when better resources are available to me.
Jason Patz 