Nemesis - Redux

Hi all.

This is a thread for a recent upgrade to a saber I made six years ago. Before I get into it, I would like to thank Obi-Shane and Darkside Engineering for their soldering iron recommendations and Obi-Shane for all of his soldering advice and for making me two awesome 1" dia. thick-walled blades in a very short amount of time. Thanks man, you saved my butt on this one. I would also like to thank Aaron of Solo's Hold for his awesome batteries and speakers, Darth Ryo of G.O.T.H. 3Designs for his awesome 3D printed chassis, erv of Plecter Labs for the awesome soundboard and Tim of The Custom Saber Shop for always providing awesome parts with which to build sabers.

Back in 2011, I and my cousin Jonathan finished building a saber for him called "Nemesis". The idea behind it was to make it look very aggressive so we went with claws on the emitter and a spiked pommel. Jonathan wanted it to be capable of heavy dueling so we made the aluminum claws 3/8" thick. He also wanted it to be very comfortable to wield and with no visible activation box or buttons/switches. To work around this, I made the pommel spike, spring-loaded so that when pressed in, it activated a momentary switch inside the pommel. You can view the original thread for that saber here...

http://forums.thecustomsabershop.com...hlight=nemesis

Back then, money was tight and soundboard selection wasn't as plentiful so we ended up using an Ultrasound 2.0 that I had purchased two years earlier. Unfortunately This board had "switch bouncing" issues which I was able to fix with a small capacitor on the switch leads. This basically made it the same as the 2.1 version of this board. Also unfortunate is that this soundboard has a voltage regulator built in and using a 7.4 battery pack with a 3.xV single die LED, causes the excess voltage to bleed off as heat. This particular board can not take that much heat for long. Also, while this board can work from 4.5V to 9.6V, it needs at least 6V to fully function properly. This meant going with a 4AA battery pack and 1.5V alkaline batteries when using single die LEDs to still have the board work properly. Fortunately he never encountered any overheating issues with this setup. Now comes the hassle. When he's dueling, eventually a battery briefly breaks contact with another battery or with the springs in the battery holder which then shuts off the saber. He dealt with this very annoying problem for six years. Enough was enough. Time to upgrade.

This time Jonathan wanted the saber to be able to change to any blade color and still have a hidden button/switch. My original idea was to use a Spark 2 r2 with it's optional one-button support. However that board and revision can only do three colors max with one of those three colors being a mix of the other two (like red, blue, purple for example). However he really wanted more colors (and this is before the Spark 2 r3 came out) so we decided on a Prizm v4. This meant that he would need two switches in his saber instead of one, both hidden if possible. The solution we came up with was to use two of the six pommel screws to act as the switches. Basically those two screws would press down on momentary tactile switches. Since the pommel spike would no longer be a switch, I decided to make it screw on/off to provide access to a recharge port with kill key.

The first thing I did was modify the saber itself to accommodate the new switch setup as well as a 7/8" dia. LED/heat sink module from TCSS. The bottom of the blade holder was designed for the original TCSS LED heat sinks, the flat disk ones. Those that have been around awhile know what I'm talking about. That heat sink rested on a very thin 1/4" tall metal ring that I had glued to the inside of the hilt. I was able to remove that ring by ramming it out using some aluminum tube. The hole in the bottom of the blade holder that holds the LED and lens was just a little over 7/8" in dia. Too much over to properly secure the TCSS LED/heat sink module. I bored it out a little more and inserted a metal sleeve (that I glued on with metal epoxy) that fits the blade holder and LED/heat sink module. I then modified the pommel by removing the spring-loaded internals and the momentary switch and then milled three 3/8" wide slots in it. I did some lathe work on the bottom hole of the pommel and the "tang" of the pommel spike and "butchered" some MHS tonfa parts to get the threads needed to be able to screw the spike onto the pommel. An O-ring inside the pommel allows the spike to be tightened to the desired orientation and depth while still being tight and secure. With the handle, I then bored out the threads of two of the pommel screw holes. For the same two holes, I then milled the recessed portion for the screw heads, slightly deeper. I then made two custom 3/8" square 8-32 nuts from some solid aluminum round bar, that I made to have an outside diameter that matched the inside diameter of the saber handle. This allows for the top of the nuts to conform with the inside diameter of the hilt to help make it harder for them to rotate when the pommel is not present. I used a small spring that I cut into some much smaller springs, to put under the screw heads of the two screws that will act as switches. This makes them a bit more "tactile" feeling and helps prevent them from unscrewing from the nuts via vibration and general handling.

On to the internals. I decided to go with a full chassis for this saber but like the original internals, I did not have to make it pretty (thank goodness) or add a crystal chamber. That and the fact that I also did not have to install any accent LEDs, made certain aspects of this build much easier. I thought it would be cool for the LED/heat sink module to be part of the chassis so I did that by making a chassis disk that I glued to the LED/heat sink module. For the next part, I decided to make things easier by going with a G.O.T.H. 3Designs 3D printed chassis from Shapeways. I got the 1.24" dia. version that holds only a Prizm and an 18650 battery. I designed the chassis around all of these things as well as the switch setup and side sound vents. The hardest part was the acetal piece that I made for the switches. This piece also holds the recharge port and has the sound vents for the six slots on the outside bottom of the handle. Also, my cousin did not want to be able to see through any of the side vents into another vent, even slightly. This meant making six separate chambers for the sound to vent through. Fortunately I had already done something like this with two other builds. It would have been much easier to make this part from two separate pieces but acetal does not like to glue to itself and I really didn't want to use metal because of the electronics so... one piece of acetal it was... and without the use of a rotary table *sigh*. In the pics below, the top view of said piece shows nine holes, one 7/16" dia. hole in the center, surrounded by six smaller holes and two even smaller holes. The center hole is for the recharge port and it's wires, the six smaller holes are part of the sound ventilation system and the two even smaller holes are for the wires from the two tactile switches. The side view shows where the switches go as well as six vertical slots going around the circumference of the part. Each of those slots connects to one of the six sound holes that you can see from the top view. The other piece of acetal holds the speaker and is designed to connect to the chassis rods and allow the wires from the recharge port and switches to pass over the speaker and out the back. A metal tube connects the two pieces of acetal together via 3-48 counter-sinking screws. There is a 3/8" gap between the two pieces of acetal and the depth of the six holes is about 9/16". As such, the resonance is actually quite nice and the volume is loud. There is also an acetal disk on the other side of the 3D printed chassis that helps to strengthen the chassis and hold the battery in place. The battery wires stick out from the side of the battery a little bit which prevents full insertion of the battery into the 3D chassis. To rectify that, I machined a 3/4" diameter depression on the acetal disk so that the disk can fully seat against the 3D printed chassis. There is also a metal chassis disk between the 3D printed chassis and the LED/heat sink module. This disk connects the mid/lower part of the chassis to the upper part which allows me to adjust the overall length of the chassis so that it fits perfectly into the saber.

When I wired it up, I decided to leave the JST connector on the battery and the full length of wires from the battery to the JST connector as there was plenty of room in the hilt for it. Less work that way and it provides for an easy swap-out of the battery if needed.

In the pics below, it may look difficult to remove and insert the SD card. However it's not too bad. I use a pair of extremely needle pointed, needle nose pliers to do that and have done it several times since it was all wired up without any issues or unsoldering of wires.

Specs:
Prizm v4 soundboard
Solo's Hold 10 Amp High Drain Li-Ion 18650 3.7V 3200mAh PCB protected rechargeable battery
G.O.T.H. 3Designs GCM124-01-PZM - PRIZM PC3.5 + 18650 cell 3D printed chassis
TriCree XPE-2 R,G,rB (1.2 Ohm, 2 watt Resistor on Red and 1 Ohm, 2 watt resistors on G and rB.)
TCSS 7/8" dia. LED/heat sink module
Two .25" by .25" momentary tactiles from China via ebay.
TCSS 2.1mm recharge port/kill switch
TCSS kill plug style 5 - Black
Solo's Hold 28mm speaker
TCSS 4-40 chassis rods
TCSS JST connector
Speaker, switches and LED wires are stranded 30ga and the recharge port wires are stranded 26ga.

Vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq1nI7wurqo

Pics:

Before:

https://i.imgur.com/i6le8fi.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/B5G4LyB.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/0z1PO0Q.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/CVYDyCz.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/uXvVXh7.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/yD5cDsH.jpg

After:

https://i.imgur.com/Z07Gati.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/cbiRdkQ.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/Lg8oJWs.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/DYTaXmE.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/T9SlHIZ.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/mYn2Gh1.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/OXlEIax.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/VCfcTzr.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/6zXLgTf.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/1Z6VFi2.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ZzcmiFp.jpg

Thanks for reading and I hope you like it. :)