Hilt made of Manzanita! Need help to make it a saber.

Hello Saber forums. I'm new to the website but i'm not unfamiliar to how sabers are made. My roomate Nesyad had a custom saber built from here and he suggested i come to you guys with my saber idea. I'd like to make my hilt from manzanita. It's a pretty strong wood from Sierra Nevada where i live.

The piece of wood is about a foot long (cut it long to have room) and about 1 1/2 inches in diameter. I have a few photos to help as well. Any information, help or ideas would be awesome.

The idea i had was to cut a hole in the side of the hilt to fit the battery pack and drill a hole up the center that would lead to the emitter. I was thinking that the emitter and the light source would not be inside the wood but screw into the top so that i don't have to hollow out too much.

Anyhow, thanks for the input and i hope to hear from anyone. ^^

I'm actually going to be starting something similar myself here in a few weeks. I'll be using a piece of driftwood with an emitter stalk. The one thing I can tell you for sure is that you will want to have something going down to where you will grip the saber to act as a tang if you intend to do any duelling. A length of wood holds up well by itself, but if you extend it, there will be a lot of stress at the joint, so you want that tang to strengthen everything. It's much like a real sword here.

If you just want a show saber, it isn't as important but you do need to be sure to reinforce the joint between the emitter/blade. As for powering that guy, you will be VERY limited by space. Wood, even strong wood, needs a decent amount of material to hold up. This again ties into the tang situation. If you drill through the wood most of the way down and insert pipe, you'll have a very strong saber with an attractive wooden grip.

I'm actually going to be fabricating an emitter head to house the drainpipe converter and then running a 3/4" tube from that most of the way down my grip and stuffing a very minimal set or electronics in there. I'm not looking for great run time, but I want a relatively functional stunt saber that looks amazing, so a single li-ion cell will be squeezed in and pushing just the LED.

If you aren't familiar with woodworking AND electronics, I would recommend playing around with basic PVC hilts for a bit to get a better idea of how everything goes together. Mine's going to be my first hilt, but I'm also a laptop hardware technician and I've made SCA grade rattan weapons and have dealt with the issues of having a nice AND functional hilt of wood over wood.

One thing to keep in mind is that luxeon style LEDs get very hot and need to be heatsinked properly. An aluminum hilt can help add to the effect of a heatsink and PVC is safe when done properly but wood is not usually so fire resistant, unless you want a fiery saber.

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Originally Posted by Crystal Chambers

One thing to keep in mind is that luxeon style LEDs get very hot and need to be heatsinked properly. An aluminum hilt can help add to the effect of a heatsink and PVC is safe when done properly but wood is not usually so fire resistant, unless you want a fiery saber.

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Copper pipe will help, too. You can make a very effective internal heat sink by making an inner tube structure built off of the aluminum or copper heatsink that you attach the LED to. Again, though, fabbing a custom heatsink gets into the advanced electronics area.

I can say thermal solution if your friend, but check cure times. AS5, which is probably the most common thermal compound on the market (it was the best in '05 and it hasn't really been unseated since) takes 500 hours of usage to burn in.

If you use copper and it still catches fire do not breath the fumes that stuff is poisonous.

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Originally Posted by Crystal Chambers

If you use copper and it still catches fire do not breath the fumes that stuff is poisonous.

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Well yes. Pretty much any emission from a metal undergoing extreme chemical corrosion is toxic. ESPECIALLY if it's an ionic reaction that's causing it (though even fumes from simple welding are toxic in large enough quantities.) We're talking high level stuff here, which I'm not sure is helping the OP much.

Short answer: Yes, you can use it for the hilt, but heat will probably be a major issue.

Long answer: See above and dig a bit into metallurgy and thermodynamics as well as the almighty Ohm.

Thank you all very much for the help. ^^ I didn't even consider heat to be an issue. As for the full tang idea i wasn't planning on using it as a dueling saber. I was merely looking for a bad ass saber to carry around.

The idea i had was to hollow out as little as possible to try and keep the woods integrity. I only meant to hollow out the side enough to put the pack into it and a small hole through the center for the wires to lead to the emitter. I was hoping the emitter could screw into or fit inside the top. I've had no real experience with electronics and was hoping it would be easy. ha ha thats what i get for thinking. So the heat issue will only be in the top part near the emitter? Would i need to put the casing your talking about only in the top where i hollow out for the emitter? Maybe only the first 4 or 5 inches?

Thanks for the help again. I look forward to hearing from you all again.

It depends on what you'll be pushinghow much show vs how much go do you want? If you just want a pretty saber that you can occasionally light up, not a duel ready prop that'll be on for hours at a time and you aren't interested in the showiest blade, you can get a fairly attractive blade by modifying a PVC build with only an inch or two of actual pipe in the wood. Enough to toss a couple of retaining screws and some eposy in there to stabalize it and then route your wires. Cable management will be an issue, obviously.

One of the easiest ways around that would be to drill a fair distance into the wood, then make a hollow and then cover the hollow with a shroud of metal. It would also give you a convenient place to mount your switch and maybe an accent LED or two. you can mount it with a couple of screws, and if you want the screws invisible, do a simple wrap with leather. I plan on doing something similar, but since I want some go to my hilt it'll be a bit more involved.

I would, again, recommend cutting your teeth on a PVC hilt to practice with, especially since you don't have a whole lot of electronics experience. Burning out a Lux I is a lot cheaper (and harder to do) than a fancy LED, and you can transfer the core of your wiring tover. It'll also teach you a bit about squeezing as much as you can into as small a space as is possible.

There is the possibility to make something that would resemble wood, much like similar work that LDM has done to replicate bone. You could sculpt over a sink tube saber and paint and weather it to look like the manzanita (not sure if I spelled that correctly.) This way you could have the saber as a functional one.

Or as you've said you could find a way to hollow enough of it out to try and fit electronics. Just figured I'd mention the above option to you as well in case you decided to duel with it in the future.

Hope this may be of some help to you,

Psab

another option would be to use pieces of it OVER the hilt, as a sort of shroud or grip material, people have experimented with wood on sabers before...