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Thread: Kreyhn's Saber

  1. #11

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    April 2020:

    Completing the emitter section was the important step here. It was needed for the switch to be put in place and wired once the chassis was ready. The next element was the chassis and crystal chamber. I wanted to use a piece of jadeite for the color crystal and quartz for the power crystal. I found a jewelry maker on etsy who worked with jadeite and bought a little bag of tumbled jadeite 'scraps'. These varied greatly in width, thickness, length, and transparency. To choose the right color crystal, I set up this test rig:


    The elements you see here are:
    chassis discs for the 1.14" ID MHS parts (as I have the grenade grip section) (TCSS added some extra holes for wires to pass through, thanks Tim)
    4-40 brass thumb nuts to hold the crystal
    4-40 brass heat set inserts as decorative end-nuts
    Brass plates designed and machined (by TCSS, thanks Tim) to hold 8/32" brass tube stock (which holds an LED) and accommodates the 4-40 all thread to mount it within the chassis
    4-40 brass nuts from TCSS to hold my LED mounts, later changed to steel for visual contrast
    4-40 all thread
    Last edited by Kreyhn; 04-18-2022 at 09:43 AM.

  2. #12

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    This step was probably the one which took me the longest. The reason: figuring out how to mount the crystals. It took a few years of wondering about different ways to hold a crystal in place which was ovaloid. Slothfurnace and others like Darth Chasm and Greenie (to name a few who have inspired me) have managed to mount hexagonal crystals. The jadeite was my bane. I bought the thumb nuts online as decorative end nuts, not knowing they were so large; they then sat uselessly in the bottom of my collection of nuts and screws. There they rested until I was watching one of GCS's/Madcow's glam videos for his elite sabers with a Krayt pearl. Nothing registered consciously. Later that day I was fishing around in my parts and came across those thumb nuts. Again, nothing clicked consciously. But! When I sat to meditate that afternoon, my mind drifted to that part and I wondered if it would fit in the center hole of the chassis discs. After meditating, I ran to my saber box, took them out, and tried it. The fit was perfect.



    Last edited by Kreyhn; 04-22-2022 at 06:56 PM.

  3. #13

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    May 2020:

    I liked a few of the crystals, but they seemed a bit small, especially compared to the quartz I had. I wanted something a little bigger. The size of the crystal I chose was limited by the ability for a 5 mm LED to illuminate the whole thing. Turns out jadeite is rather opaque. As I toyed with the pieces I had, I came up with a way to fit an LED shining into both ends of the crystal:
    ---->

    Same elements as before, but now I've included the copper pieces for the crystal chamber. Inspired by Slothfurnace's radiator fins, I designed these semi-circles to be decorative elements for the chamber and to create a wire channel. I used Adobe Illustrator to design these elements, as well as the brass plate elements mentioned earlier, which TCSS then machined for me; thanks Tim!

    I used brass nuts as spacers between the copper pieces for a few reasons. Mainly, they are consistent in height and small. I don't currently have a way to take the 3/16" brass tube stock, cut it to 1/8" length pieces, and square the ends. I could have commissioned these from TCSS, but I didn't actually know the precise dimensions my crystal chamber was going to take when I originally had pieces commissioned. So, I worked with what I had. Let me tell you, screwing on each nut over and over got old.
    Last edited by Kreyhn; 04-18-2022 at 09:48 AM.

  4. #14

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    From here, I put together a rig to test the larger pieces of jadeite, and I found the right one:

  5. #15

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    Now that I had the right crystal selected, it was time to assemble the chassis how I thought it would look. And damn, did it look good.



    I played around a little with the various nuts and heat inserts. The inserts as spacers between each copper ring just looked a bit too busy, so I used those as end elements and hex nuts as spacers. I would have used 3/16" tubing but this doesn't hug the 4-40 rod with quite tight enough of a tolerance for my taste, and the copper rings were 3/16 wide. If it didn't line up perfectly, it would have shown. Conveniently, the nuts are even in height so I don't have to sand the ends and try to get them flat. I would have loved to spin them round instead of hexagonal, but then it would have been quite difficult to tighten them all the way.
    Last edited by Kreyhn; 04-22-2022 at 07:02 PM.

  6. #16

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    August 2020

    Next step came the fine details. I found that the nuts didn't quite space things out perfectly for the jade chamber. Again focusing on uniform height of spacers, I have some K&S brass plate left over from the LED holding elements which TCSS machined. That brass plate had chassis disc sized holes, so I cut some pieces out, stacked them on some 4-40 rod, clamped them together with nuts, and spun them on a dremel. And that's how I ruined my flex shaft. The 4-40 rod wasn't enough to hold up to the side pressure and bent in the flex shaft chuck, ruining the alignment. Glad it wasn't the main body! Altogether when it was done, the spacers looked good:



    I did have to countersink the central hole in the crystal holders in order to get things to sit just perfectly; that's how I dealt with that little bit of space left.
    Last edited by Kreyhn; 04-22-2022 at 07:30 PM.

  7. #17

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    Next came cutting down the 4-40 all thread since I had the layout of the chassis and chamber just the way I wanted it:



    I used an X-acto knife to clean the burrs out of the 4-40 ends. I used the cutoff wheel to cut them to length, then to cone the tips. It got them good enough:



    Later, my dremel did die. After these rough cuts, I went back to make finalized cuts and get each rod just right. My goal was that the cone tips would show but no thread beyond them. On my last cut, my dremel cut out. Oof. I had to improvise. So I used my drill instead! The rotational speed was much slower, and the cutoff wheel wasn't perfectly circular anymore, so using the edge of the wheel was giving me grief for coning the ends nicely. Then I used the side of the cutoff wheel... carefully. They're liable to break with force in that plane. But the results were perfect and smooth! Instead of looking like a many faceted pyramid, they were smooth cones. Beautiful.




  8. #18

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    August 2020

    It's all coming together now...


  9. #19

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    Next step was to finish the externals. I have a copper covertec knob to go with the copper shroud over the brass. I tried a couple of different iterations of shroud to accompany the knob. The first was a simple partial ring:



    When I cut the copper pipe, similar to the brass sink tube, it expands. So I would have had to keep this in place with button head screws instead of set screws. Off the table. The next design iteration put the knob at the bottom of the hilt rather than the middle. To keep the pipe from expanding, I left a bridge on it:



    It ended up not having the look I was going for. In the meantime, I ended up going with some simple rings at this part of the chassis. It gave it some dimensionality and the placement of the rings allowed me to hide the MHS seams. I had to be careful drilling to avoid the MHS threads, and made a template to help:

    Last edited by Kreyhn; 01-06-2023 at 10:56 AM.

  10. #20

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    Next step, I tested different shroud designs with paper in the spot I wanted the covertec knob to live:



    My first tries didn't cut it. I was trying to keep the copper element south of the knob. Instead, I chose to make it north of the knob:



    And we had a winner!

    I made another sticker and cut it out:



    It fit well and aligned with the previously threaded screw holes and the covertec knob perfectly. And as luck would have it, the brass rim around the knob was enough that there's no gap with visible alluminum between the copper and the brass where those shroud pieces meet just north of the knob.

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