(Right click and "view image" to see full resolution pics).
So some dear friends of ours have a 10-year-old son who, like many boys his age, loves Star Wars. He's been enamored of my sabers for years, now, and made it a point to get his dad to bring him to Free Comic Book Day last year so he could see me troop in my Imperial Knight costume.
Now these folks don't have a lot of money, so they were thrilled when I offered to build the boy a saber for Christmas. They kicked up what they could towards the cost, and my wife also pitched in. The final build was nothing fancy--a basic MHS build with the following specs:
Anakin Episode III Force FX sound board
Cyan Rebel Star LED
running on a 4AAA setup.
I chose cyan because I couldn't decide between blue or green for the kid, so I went with kinda-sorta-both.
When I put the original build together it looked a bit plain, even with the addition of two black o-rings to offset the silver:
My original thought was to paint the indents on the grips black, but a quick experiment with that (which I neglected to photograph) proved inadequate. I quickly grabbed some acetone and cleaned that off.
It then occurred to me, I had some black faux leather laying around, so I quickly improvised a leather wrap around the switch area. It's a very simple design, but I find it very elegant and am so pleased with how it came out that I may in fact adapt the design to do one of my own.
I owe thanks on this one to Lendo Avery, who helped me out with the elctronics (this was my last crash course before I tackled my Luke Skywalker ESB Graflex, shown elsewhere on this board) and even donated the sound board when my Vader RotJ board turned out to have gone bad somewhere along the line.
Anyway, without further ado, here's the final product.
I call it
the Avenger.
The kid loved it--there is a photo of him on facebook wielding it but I didn't want to cross post pictures of someone else's child. I presented the hilt to him in a presentation box (just a painted-up cardboard tuck box I had) which was emblazoned with the logo of the Jedi Order. Sadly, I forgot to photograph the box, too...
I'm told his dad played with it for quite some time when he got home from work that night, too.
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