blacklight blade?

[goldsaberwarrior]

Posting here because this directly relates to a potential LED color. I posted some pics of the hilt that I'm working with on my facebook last night for some friends to see who are into this kind of stuff. One of my other friends messaged me about possibly helping him with a build. For his first build he's wanting to do a copy of one of the sabers that's featured in the animation on the home page of the store, one of the single hilts that is. The saber itself was easy enough to put together in the MHS builder and the other stuff should be as well. The one thing that he had suggested as possibly wanting was a blacklight color for the light. Far as I always knew we don't yet have a blacklight LED for saber building yet. I thought about possibly coming up with a darker color of purple to simulate a blacklight color and one of the ways I thought about doing this was possibly mixing some color discs. Pretty much what I want to know is, has anyone had experience doing something like this and what are some possible ways to simulate a blacklight color if it's possible at all?

[Ty_Bomber]

Blacklights are essentially UV purple in the light wave spectrum. You would need a UV led, but we typically don't use these, as UV light isnt really all that healthy to be around. I can't say how easy it will be to source one for our purposes though.

[Silver Serpent]

They're not too hard to source. LEDEngin makes UV LEDs on star PCBs. I'm pretty sure you can get them in Rebel versions as well. The point about them being bad for your eyes is still valid though. I'd recommend against it.

[Onli-Won Kanomi]

I concur with the warnings; there were a few attempts at UV sabers to get purple back in the early days of this hobby before colour-mixing multi-die RGB LEDS became commonplace but they were not safe and with the tight collimators we use UV LEDs could be a danger of instant permanent eye damage - it would be MUCH safer to attempt a 'deeper' purple by mixing colours using a multi-die LED that has ROYAL blue and red dies instead of normal-blue and red. Fortunately for your plans TCSS store is now carrying tri-rebels with R/G/rB dies which is what I'd strongly recommend instead of any UV. Just be aware that by making a 'deeper' purple you will necessarily sacrifice some brightness, that's just how human vision works at that end of the spectrum. Theoretically you could also get tri or quad-rebels made in custom-colour configuration using royal-blue and DEEP-red dies but that would be even DIMMER as well as more expensive so I'd try the new R/G/rB tri-rebel in the TCSS store first to see if that suits your purposes. Good Luck & MTFBWY..

[goldsaberwarrior]

I never intended to give him a full blown UV light specifically for the words of caution that were given. Thanks for the heads up on the multi-die LEDs. i'll check them out.

[FenderBender]

While they do exhibit 'some' UV qualities, the LEDengin dental blue LEDs are fine for saber use just not that bright. I think other manufacturers had a "Dental" blue color as well, just gotta do some research.