I was merely experimenting and playing around with it. It was a stupid amount of work for a gimmick. But, it helped me hone some additional skillsets I didn't have before. For instance, now I can solder EL wire, and know how to join it, power it, etc. That may come in handy some day. I have a cool gimmick at night. It really wasn't that complex, except for fitting all that stuff in the hilt, including the recharge port and additional battery. I probably could have just powered it off the saber battery, but with the side emitters, the Kylo Saber LED's already draw a lot of juice. The EL wire, not so much. I charge that battery about once a month, and the EL wire goes, and goes, and goes. I don't know how many MaH it eats up, but its got to be pretty low.
This winter, I intend on deconstructing one of my Kylo sabers, and completely changing out how I did it. I'm changing boards to SC2, going to a quad cree on main emitter, and tri-crees on side emitters. I want it to have flash on clash, including in side emitters. I also want to blend colors with Deep Red and Red on Main Blades/Side Emitters. I'll try a 26650 battery to run it, and then see if I have room to squeeze in the Chasing EL Inverter and the Chasing EL Inverter switch, and possibly an independent battery to run all of that. Oh, and a custom chassis with maybe even a Crystal Chamber reveal.
I'm not doing that because my saber doesn't work well, I'm doing all this to learn more stuff on my own sabers. When I'm confident enough in the quality/durability of my own builds, then perhaps I can expand out to do commissions/custom builds/sales. Right now I have a Graflex 2.0 going together with a NBIV. That will all be new to me, because I've only wired NEC boards prior to this.
Good luck, I like the idea of trying EL in the crystal chamber.
Tom
Bookmarks