Gift sabres I built

[Donnovan Sunrider]

Well what do you know, I actually built some lightsabres in this century!
I've made them before, but the last one was back in 1998 when I made the plasma blade version of Exitilius.

Well, I just completed a pair of LED sabres for my neice(7) and nephew(10) for Christmas. They're nothing fancy, but I'm pretty satisfied with the results overall. I think I may need to do a couple of tweaks before wrapping them, but they're just about ready to go, and complete enough that I'm good with showing them off.



Here's the stats:
Ben Sabre
This was meant to be a vaguely Luke V2 type of thing.

1.25" Sink tube
MHS 1.25" sink tube blade holder
Lux III Royal Blue LED
Hasbro Obi-Wan Force Action sound board
Speaker salvaged from old Blackberry 8700c
Radio Shack 4-pin microphone connectors male & female
Radio Shack momentary button
TCSS 4 AAA battery holder
24" Ultra Sabers Initiate Blade
Various additional hardware bits


Melanie Sabre
Her favorite character is R2-D2 (same as myself), so I made hers in silver, has a white barrel and blue.

1.25" Sink tube
MHS 1.25" sink tube blade holder
Seul P4 white LED
Magenta color filter (to make pink)
Hasbro Vader Force Action sound board
Speaker salvaged from old Blackberry 8700c
Radio Shack 4-pin microphone connectors
Radio Shack momentary button
TCSS 4 AAA battery holder
24" Ultra Sabers Initiate Blade
Various additional hardware bits



Lit room with no flash.


Dark room with no flash.

They're both pretty mundane on the outer appearance. My Dremel-Fu is just beginning, so I didn't try anything like fancy outer shrouds yet. I stuck to simple. I expect to do some upgrades to both of these over the years, starting with the blades.
The part I'm proud of though is the internal workings. I needed it to be simple for my sister in law to change out the batteries without a lot of fuss. And not wanting a long wire to have to cram back into the hilt, I had to think of an alternative.

[Donnovan Sunrider]

What I came up with was a removable module that includes the speaker, battery pack, sound board and a plug that will connect to the front of the hilt with the LED and power switch.
I found that not only does a standard soft drink bottle cap fit perfectly in a sink tube, but that the Blackberry speaker fits perfectly in a bottle cap. That gave me the start point in the design. It took me a few weeks of fiddling with different configurations to get something that worked, and also playing with different connecters and switches. I wanted modular and able to be disassembled. Nothing internal is glued, it's all screwed together.


Both sabres with the sound modules pulled out.
You can see the Blackberry speaker on the right module snug in the green of the bottle cap. The black ring is the rubber gasket that came with the sink tubes. This was also before I painted the bottom of the right sabre silver and cleaned up the white tube.

Here are the shots I took of the building of the modules for anyone else wanting to expand on the idea.


Everything all wired up for testing.


Here is the Hasbro board wired to the battery pack/speaker to the right and the microphone jack on the left.
I removed and replaced all of the hair-thin stock wires that Hasbro put on it.


This is what the mic jack looks like on the business end.


The female side of the jack went into another cap, and went to the power button and LED.
The hole is for a retaining set screw. I drilled and tapped the plastic like I would a metal part. The screw part of the bottle in there gives it some extra stability.

[Donnovan Sunrider]

A little more detail on the wires from the female jack.


Here is the whole unit wired up and tested. I later had to remove the quick disconnects due to size constraints in the hilt, but I can still remove the whole unit from the hilt pretty easily.


Here are both modules side by side. The clear parts are made from the blades of the sabres the sound boards came from. Ben gets Obi-Wan (Fitting I thought), and Melanie gets a Vader board (Yeah, she's a little Sithy sometimes).


Questions, comments, crits, compliments, haikus, etc are appreciated.

[sekrogue1985]

very neat looking

[gundamaniac]

Nice! I just completed a gift saber, but I need to do somethin about the rattling battery pack in mine...

I love the way you made your modules! That is just really really really awesome. Keeps all the electronics nice and neat.

[Donnovan Sunrider]

Thanks guys. I know the outside is pretty much crap compared to most of the work here, but I wanted to show off the internals.

The only issue I've found came up after getting in the blades a handful of days ago. The Hasbro board is mainly held in place by the wires, so it's essentially floating. This can make the clash a less sensitive. I'm probably going to try some kind of tweak to it to make the board more in contact with the colored tube so the clash goes off properly.

[gundamaniac]

I actually really like your Ben Sabre. It's a great hardware hilt and looks comfortable to handle (haha! I made a punny!)

And you ought to be proud of your internals. They're really awesome.

[Jedi-Loreen]

Interesting module.

How are the male ends of the connectors held in the sabers? Are the connectors keyed so that you can connect them easily when you slide the modules back in?

[Donnovan Sunrider]

The connectors are held on with the nut that came with it. There's a hole in the bottle cap that's just big enough to put it through. The module itself is held by the pommel cap.

It's hard to tell from my crappy pics (I'll try for more clear pics before I wrap them up), but there's a little half-circle bit that lets the connector only fit in one direction. That bit lines up with the power button, and it just slides right in.
You can sorta make it out in the forth pic down in the second post. The nut is visible there too.

[Jedi-Loreen]

I was not asking how the connectors are held on the cap, that's obvious, but how the male end was held inside the saber.

The female end is the one that's on the module, the male end would be inside the saber.

Maybe you just pull everything out, and disconnect the module because the male end is not secured in any way? That's what I'm trying to find out.

If that is true, then I'm not sure I understand why you needed to put the connectors on in the first place.

Also, why the quick disconnect on the switches?

I'm not criticizing, I'm just curious as to why you did the internals it like you did. I like to see interesting things that people do with the insides of the sabers they build.