Tarragon's MHS Saber

[Tarragon Rill]

Here is the first rendition of an assembly for the Obi hilt. It is sitting on the Emitter right now just as a way to hold it up for photographing. It will of course slip inside the hilt sections in the end. You can see here an O-ring at the upper end, and the white vanes at the lower end. These are the exact size of the Hilt's ID, so they hold this whole assembly very snug when it is in place. The over all lenght of this so far is about half of the available space in the hilt, so I will still need to fill the rest. To this end I have not made any "permanent" construction here, I have just tacked this Crystal Chamber together for testing.



Here you can see the solution to the attachment problem I was talking about previously. Rather than glue the crystal socket to the armature, I slipped it in the central hole, and used some winding wire to wrap it. The wire had a nice lip to rest on creating a very elegant way to attach them.



The beginning of the assembly process.



Here the 440S can motor armature is fitted to the bottom of the "crystal Chamber". I cut the motor shaft just above the rotor where the brushes would have run. I then polished this rotor down about 1/64" so it would slip into the bottom of the Crystal Socket.



As in various Light saber Lore, there were actually up to 3 "Crystals", I have placed a "Krayte Dragon Pearl" as a secondary "Crystal".






There are tons more picture of various parts of the assembly, the testing process, and various crystals etc. If you are following this thread, you really need to check the link to my Sky drive account, where you can find many more pictures.

[Shadar Al'Niende]

One question, what are the brass looking rods made from? Did I miss that? Anyway, GOOD STUFF! Me Likey!

[Ronan]

Can he see my MSN or Email? He can use those to contact me.

[Tarragon Rill]

The Brass rods are just that. Brass rods purchased at the locoal hobby store. Most hobby shops will cary a wide selection of brass and aluminum rods, tubes, sheets, etc. in many sizes. If you have not seen these before, it is a good idea to ask your hobby shop, they are great for small projects like this.

[Ronan]

The Brass rods are just that. Brass rods purchased at the locoal hobby store. Most hobby shops will cary a wide selection of brass and aluminum rods, tubes, sheets, etc. in many sizes. If you have not seen these before, it is a good idea to ask your hobby shop, they are great for small projects like this.

My hobby stores are special. They only special order those...


>__________>

[Tarragon Rill]

OK, my MHS hilt arrive a few hours ago, and as I am sure all of you know the joy of opening that box and seeing your creation for the first time, I do not need to describe that. Once again you all know this, but the craftsmanship was excellent. Even on this hilt that was one big custom machine job, from end to end, it turned out flawless. Well not really but more on that later.





The AV switch here I got as a free sample from a parts supplier, thinking I was going to be buying them for my company.... Oh well, maybe if TCSS is still having a hard time finding AV switches I can give this info to Tim, and he can get them from this supplier, and I will not feel so bad. :P

The blade is green so I really wanted a green lighted AV, but ya it was free so I guess I'll deal with it.



In this next picture you can see the crystal chamber where I had moved the MPP flash clamp up to reveal it.

The 2 small o-rings are to make the MPP clamp fit the hilt, as the MPP flash has a slightly larger OD than the MHS hilts. This is just a bit larger so the clamp can grip something to give it a firm lock in place. This is where the flaw comes in. As Tim and I had no idea what we were doing really, it was sort of a guess and lets see what happens. The grooves for the O-rings were either a hair to big, or too small, depending on how you look at it. The O-rings singly are a bit small for the grooves, so I doubled them up, but now they are a hair too big. It all works, but if I was to remake this hilt, I would make the grooves a hair bigger so the 2 O-rings both fit down in the groove snugly. Keeping them doubled as on this setup however, to make the overall aesthetics more pleasing. As singly these O-rings just looked out of place.





And here is a size comparison to a Graflex, it is longer by just about 1"



As a note on this, the entire hilt from the joint with the choke, to the pomel cap is one piece. it started out as a 7" FF tube, and than all the detailing you see Tim then machined in. All the flutes were custom fit around the switcbox, the O-ring grooves were custom fit for the crystal chamber, and the chamber itself is custom obviosly. It was all done to very exacting sizes to make the crystal chamber the exact size to be hidden by the MPP clamp. The reason for the hilt to be one piece is the length. To have made this basic design with standard pieces, the hilt would hav ended up something like 16" long. I know some out there like the longer hilts, so for them this would be a much easier build. My goal however, was to make it fit in a Graflex size hilt. However having said that, I am now looking at the electronics package..... I am going to have to find a portable black hole to get the 2 Trustfire 18650 batteries in there. Oh well not sure what I will do about this, but as someone pointed out in one of my threads.... The 2 batteries are so long, that when placed end to end, as must be inside the MHS hilts. They will extend into the crystal chamber. Oh well, I will think of something, maybe just have to rethink this design and make a new one. I'll get back to this later.


Unfortunately I am in a mad rush as I am deployed over seas, and have not had time to work on the "Static Display Obi-Won" hilt but I'll get back to these 2 projects in a few months when I return to the states.


As always, more pictures not posted here are on my skydrive site. If interested, follow the link to my Skydrive page in my sig.

[Shadar Al'Niende]

I am not sure what clamp you are using, but if using one of the replicas like what used to be sold in the store, it should come with a black plastic shim on the inside of the clamp, on top of that, you should be able to spin the lever to tighten the clamp down over the hilt pieces.

Good job on designing the custom modification from Tim on the DF 7". It is pricey but totally worth it! Tim does awesome work for an affordable price. I like your use of the switch box as well.. good luck!

[Tarragon Rill]

I have a clamp form an original MPP, and yes it has the plastic shim... However, it does not really fit well, as the clamp has to close so far that it no longer fits the LED bubble strip very well. Thus the sides of the clamp flex inwards and looked funny. I plan to put the "battery meter" in the "clamp" portion instead of, or as well as, the the usual LED bubbles. I have not worked out the details on this yet, but I hope to have it under the LED bubbles, so they act as lenses for the batery meter's bar graph. Unfortunatly the 2 projects are on hold for another 3 mo. or so, until I return to the states and can work on them some more.