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Thread: Ultimate FX Kylo Ren Conversion?

  1. #11

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    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixHawk View Post
    in the short...yes

    in the short of what? and yes for what?

  2. #12

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    Quote Originally Posted by kaye17 View Post
    in the short of what? and yes for what?
    You asked if it could be replaced...

    Quote Originally Posted by kaye17 View Post
    Hi, What is the update regarding on this one?

    I have a question, I'm going to replace the blade with 40" long and the LED, so how can I replace the LED with string type but achieve the same effect(light upwards and when it is off light downwards).

    Thanks!
    That saber already has a LED string in it....quietstarr is replacing it for a Rebel Star single LED. You asked if it could be replaced with a 40" blade(not sure why you want the blade that long....you must be very tall) Anyways.. after you took it apart you would have to add to the string to fill in the extra space at the end of the blade. Witch is a lot of soldering....unless you bought two and pieced the two together to fill in the extra space of your 40" blade. And like Jay-gon Jinn said...those are made of plastic....if you did manage to get it apart without braking it... like quietstarr said...
    Quote Originally Posted by quietstarr View Post
    This in itself has been an ordeal as Hasbro has used an excessive amount of glue on the @#$% thing.
    I'm not sure the plastic frame could hold the weight of a 40" blade...(even if you got the thin walled blade...there still heavy at that length)

  3. #13

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    Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixHawk View Post
    You asked if it could be replaced...



    That saber already has a LED string in it....quietstarr is replacing it for a Rebel Star single LED. You asked if it could be replaced with a 40" blade(not sure why you want the blade that long....you must be very tall) Anyways.. after you took it apart you would have to add to the string to fill in the extra space at the end of the blade. Witch is a lot of soldering....unless you bought two and pieced the two together to fill in the extra space of your 40" blade. And like Jay-gon Jinn said...those are made of plastic....if you did manage to get it apart without braking it... like quietstarr said...
    I'm not sure the plastic frame could hold the weight of a 40" blade...(even if you got the thin walled blade...there still heavy at that length)
    ahhh I see. Thank you!. So maybe a 30 - 35 inches long would be better?. Yeah saw their work on how they opened it.
    I might give it a shot and post some updates here soon if I got time. Thanks!

  4. #14

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    So just in case anyone comes across this thread like I did looking to do a conversion or other work on this particular lightsaber, I have a few notes to add to things here:

    1) As others have noted, this thing is really hard to get apart. There are five pieces you have to pry off: 2x side guard covers, a ring around the emitter / blade, a small cover just below the emitter ring and then the entire base of the saber (what is effectively the sound chamber). For me, everything except the sound chamber bottom was glued and I was able to just pop them off. The sound chamber appeared to be sonic welded in place and I had to cut it with a dremel (I only needed to cut half of it). This cut alone makes the whole operation pretty pointless if you want to have a decent showpiece at the end (not that it was ever particularly accurate to begin with).

    2) Converting this saber to full base-lit or neopixel is extremely impractical for three reasons: The sound board area is extremely oddly shaped (like an L), the battery compartment is wildly impractical for any reasonably sized lithium battery (I guess you could use lithium AA batteries, but still) and there's really just not enough rigidity to the frame to handle a longer blade as would be common with such conversions (I suppose you could keep the stock blade length, but it is comically small).

    3) If anyone is interested, the stock blade achieves the "fade in" blade ignition feat by using 5 different LED zones (each approximately 5 LEDs). The control board outputs a variable voltage (0v to VDD) to each zone sequentially to give the appearance of progression (vs the more sophisticated RGB / PIXEL blades more common now). The entire reason I even bothered opening this one up was to repair a damaged LED zone (top 4 LEDs would not light, turned out to be a broken trace in the flexible PCB that the LEDs were connected to, so I ran a separate wire for zone 5 up to the tip).

    4) I was hugely not a fan of the stock blade appearance, so I heavily sanded the blade and cross guards to mask the imperfections. It doesn't really improve the diffusion much, but it makes it feel slightly less like the toy that it ultimately is.

    So, while it may seem tempting to give it a whirl, I'd really recommend against trying to convert one of these. Even repairing them is pretty dicey as there is now a huge gouge in the front due to dremeling the base off (too lazy to properly fill it and repaint the whole thing).

    TLDR; Unless you really enjoy breaking things with marginally little to show for it, I'd suggest not attempting to upgrade or modify these Ultimate FX sabers.

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