I've been lurking around this site for months and finally have something to show for it so I thought I would share my simplistic little saber with everyone.

If you want to hear the story of my eclectic road I took to get to this point, read below. If not, just skip to the pictures!

For my first saber, I wanted something simple and easy in design, similar to Darth Vader's saber. I used one of my cheap collapsing hasbro sabers as a basis for the design and then I got some PVC, saws, spray paint, and whatever else you need to make one of these things. The first issue I had was with the blade material. You see, I'm pretty frugal, so I didn't want to spend the money on clear PVC online. But to my surprise, I saw this clear-ish PVC pipe at my local Menard's called PEX, I thought it was the perfect blade since it was really cheap. Only problem is this stuff is really weird with the dimensions. The 5 foot piece of PEX I bought was 3/4", but had an internal diameter of 5/8" and outside diameter of 7/8". So the next problem was finding a proper cap for this weird tube, which took a while to find, but I ended up using some 5/8" white furniture caps with a 1/2" steel cap inside of it to act as a reflector. They don't look the best, but they do the job for now! I started out making a component blade (following some wonderful tutorials on this site!) but that didn't work too well after painstakingly bending and soldering about 100 of those buggers together. No matter what sytrofoam I used to wrap the led string, nothing seemed to diffuse right (I was using the super wide strawhat LEDs) unless I did a lot of wraps, but then it wouldn't fit into my 5/8 ID blade! So I eventually gave up and ordered some generic 3w red LEDs along with some 5 degree lenses. They finally arrived today, so I attached the LED to a copper cap and assembled the whole thing together! The blade isn't really bright unless it is pretty dark, and the light seems to dissipate towards the top of the blade (it is 2.5 feet by the way) but I attribute this mostly to the fact that my blade is a bit off center from the LED lens because of my blade stop screws requiring nuts since I drilled the wholes a bit too wide. But that really doesn't show much in pictures.

I'm not a huge fan of how the spray painted PVC looks. This was my first time really spray painting anything, so it is probably user error! I think I'll try doing some sink tube sabers next. I'll eventually move to some of those higher end LEDs (e.g. Rebels) but I had to order 10 of these red 3w LEDs, so I think I'll stick with my cheap alternatives for a while. Well enough ranting, here are some pictures!






May the force be with you!