Force FX Construction Set to LedEngin RGBA, 15-color configuration with Corbin driver
This tutorial shows you how to convert your Force FX Construction Set (a.k.a. "Joe Jedi") from a 1-Watt, 3-color configuration to a 3-Watt, 15-color configuration that uses a 3-Watt Corbin driver to add a "shimmering" (and optional "flash on clash") effect, and which results in a removable blade and a solid hilt.
Please note that this is much more complicated than a standard MR/Hasbro-to-Luxeon III conversion. If you have not done at least one conversion before, believe me, this is not the one you want to start with.
Also note that because this conversion uses the 3aaa battery/speaker pack that comes with the kit, the LedEngin RGBA LED will not be as bright as it would be with a 4aaa set-up. HOWEVER, if you try to feed the Construction Set soundboard (known as the "616") more than 4.5 Volts, you will fry the sound, and be left with a very quiet saber. There are possible ways to get around this problem, but you try them at your own risk. The conversion I introduce here works, so I won't discuss hypothetical variations.
Parts you will need:
- A LedEngin 10-Watt RGBA LED (LZ4-20MA10)
- A 1.25" Sink tube LED/Blade holder
- A Corbin 3-Watt LED driver (latching!) EDIT: I haven't tried this with the new round driver.
- Two small 3-Watt resistors for the Red and Yellow lines (I recommend 7.5 Ohms, but you can add or subtract a couple of Ohms depending on the precise colors you want. Xicon Passive Components makes nice, compact resistors.)
- A 16-position coded rotary switch, such as these
- A 5-volt reed relay (I used an Omron LAD1-5DC, but Omron has discontinued its reed relay series. If someone can recommend a substitute, I'm all ears.)
- A 5-degree collimator
- A Luxeon III/V lens holder
- Thin, flexible wire, preferably in red, green, blue, yellow, and white or black (You need to fit three wires into one of the grooves on the heat sink, two into the other groove)
- Heatshrink
- J-B Weld or something similar to attach the rotary switch firmly to the plastic housing (I used J-B Kwik)
- Masking or cellophane tape
- Some kind of strong rubber cement (to attach the plastic emitter lip to the aluminum blade)
- Super glue (to hold the rotary switch in place while you apply the J-B Weld)
- 2 8-32, 3/16" (M4, 5mm) set screws (A 1/4" set screw might work, but then again it might be just a bit too long)
Tools you will need:
- Hammer
- Something to punch out the pins
- Small Philips screwdriver
- 3/32" (2mm) Allen wrench
- Soldering iron and solder
- Hot glue gun (Optional--rubber cement can be used instead)
- Drill
- 8-32 tap
- Lighter or hair dryer to shrink heatshrink
- Vise or drill stand
- Dremel-style router
- Wire stripper
First you want to take the hilt apart. I can't improve on Grayven's excellent video tutorial (Part 1), so check that out and follow his instructions. (But note that the pins need to be punched out from the side opposite the switch.)
From there, just about everything is different from Grayven's tutorial. (For starters, you won't be using the original RGB LED, and you can replace the blade with the blade of your choice.)
It might be easiest to start by wiring the LED and putting it in the blade holder.
Here is the wiring diagram for the entire conversion.
For now, focus on the wiring of the LedEngin RGBA (and ignore the resistors for the moment). You just need to solder as shown, so that you have about 5" (12 cm) of each of the five wires (Red positive, Green positive, Blue positive, Amber positive, and common negative) coming off the LED star printed circuit board (PCB).
You need to be particularly careful of placement and angle of the wires as you solder, keeping in mind that you need to be able to use the nylon screws to fix the LED to the heat sink, have three wires going through one groove, two going through another, and you also need to be able to fit the lens holder firmly onto the PCB. No matter how neatly you do it, though, you will probably need to use the Dremel or a file to shave the lens holder in order for it to lay flat against the PCB. Also, as you probably know, the collimator will not snap neatly into the lens holder. It never does. So I usually clip off the little "catches" that are supposed to (but don't) hold on to the collimator.
When you have the LED wired, you should test each color by touching its positive wire and the common negative wire to the corresponding posts on the battery pack.
Now fix the PCB to the heatsink with the nylon screws, put the lens holder and collimator in place, get the wires in the grooves, and push the heatsink into the blade holder as far as it will go. Look down the blade holder to make sure the lens is flat and flush against the blade holder. If it is, you should have about 3/4" (19mm) of heatsink protruding from the bottom of the blade holder. Use 4 of the 5 set screws provided with the blade holder to fix the heatsink in place. (Just make sure none of the holes are overlapping the grooves, or you may damage the wires when you put the retention screws in.
Now you need to cut the plastic housing. By happy coincidence, the pair of holes that held the upper pin in place corresponds nicely to the pair of threaded holes in the blade holder, shown below.
You will need to keep the "lip" of the plastic emitter, since that is what holds the cosmetic pieces in place, so you will cut out a section of the plastic housing that is the same length as the blade holder (not including the protruding heatsink!), following the red lines in the photo. I used a Dremel to make the cuts, but a band-saw would probably work well. I'd be wary of a hacksaw, unless I was sure I could make a very straight cut.
After cutting the housing, I used super glue to put the two sections of the plastic emitter back together. I used sandpaper to smooth the edges of the housing where I made the cuts. I then used rubber cement to attach the plastic emitter to the blade holder. You might also want to sand the inner side of the plastic emitter, because I found that a standard 1-inch (thin-walled) polycarbonate blade is a tight squeeze if you leave the plastic emitter as is.
This is a good time to drill a hole for the rotary switch and fix it in place with J-B Weld. You want to drill a 3/8" (10mm) hole precisely between the two pin holes on the bottom side of the plastic housing, thusly:
Choose the position you want to attach the rotary switch in. I placed mine with the "0" facing the emitter, but ease of wiring is probably a more important concern. You will have to bend the pins out a bit in order for everything to fit, so it makes sense to position the switch so that you can bend them perpendicularly to the length of the housing, like this:
In the above photo, I have already applied the J-B Weld Kwik, but before you do that, it's a good idea to apply a small dab of super glue to each corner of the switch, place the switch so that it lines up with the hole, and let it set a bit. This will hold the switch in place while you apply the J-B Weld (which is thick, and would otherwise push the switch around). A few minutes after you've applied the J-B Weld, use a small screwdriver and turn the switch. This is just in case some of the J-B Weld leaked onto the dial itself. I repeated this process every few minutes three or four times, because I did not want to find that I couldn't turn the switch.
With J-B Weld Kwik, you will need 4 hours for it to cure. With regular J-B Weld, you should let it cure overnight.
While that's drying, let's start the major surgery.
You will not be using the Construction Set's LED (or its holder), so you snip the red, green, blue and brown wires as shown.
Leave enough wire (3/4"or so) at the base, because you are going to bundle the red, green and blue wires into a single positive leading to post #2 on the reed relay. (Note that the wiring will depend on your relay!) The brown, negative wire will be run to post #6 on the relay. After modification, the wiring should look like this:
Now things get complicated.
The Corbin driver, relay, and resistors will all be positioned below the Construction Set soundboard, where there is a fair amount of dead space. EDIT: I haven't tried this with the new round driver. Here's a photo of the partially wired set-up.
It's hard to make sense of, but the positive and negative leads discussed above are soldered to the relay (although the yellow switch wires from the Corbin driver have not yet been soldered to the relay). The leads from the power source to the Corbin board can be seen tucked through the plastic housing, and are wired to the soundboard like this:
And here's what things look like after some more progress:
The Corbin driver has been hot-glued to the back face of the housing, just far enough down that it doesn't bump into the wired rotary switch. EDIT: I haven't tried this with the new round driver. The wires for the Corbin driver have been soldered to the relay, and the relay has been hot-glued on the face of the housing immediately below (behind?) the Corbin driver. The resistors have also been added to the Red and Amber lines, and since they will be lined up next to the relay, I made sure the wires were long enough.
It is a tight fit. I found that a portion of the Corbin driver kept the housing from closing cleanly, so I drilled a hole in the housing to accommodate it. You'll also notice two other big cuts in the bottom side of my housing. Those were made to accommodate the first resistors I tried. They fit, but just barely. I had a hard time getting the housing back into the aluminum tube. Here's a comparison that shows how different in size two different 3-Watt, 7.5. Ohm resistors can be:
With the new, smaller resistors, those big cuts are unnecessary, but you will still probably have to do a bit of shaving, cutting, and/or drilling to get the two sides of the plastic housing to fit back together cleanly.
Here's everything soldered and hot-glued into place.
Note that I hot glued the two clash sensors (one for the soundboard, one for the Corbin driver) into place, so that they fit between the heatsink and the middle face of the housing, but also allow room for the wiring of the rotary switch. (These sensors are the main reasons you will need to bend the posts of the rotary switch back. Just be careful in bending! I had one post snap off and had to replace the whole switch.)
And that's basically it for the major surgery. Now you want to tuck everything in and get the two sides of the plastic housing back together, fit the blade holder/heatsink in place, and tape everything together with masking tape or cellophane tape. Here's a top and bottom view:
Note the alignment of the holes on the blade holder! This is very important, because you are going to fix the blade holder to the outer aluminum sheath by running the two 8-32, 3/16" (M4, 5mm) set screws through the tube and into these holes in the blade holder.
And speaking of the aluminum sheath, it's time to make a couple of modifications to it. First, drill a 3/8" (10mm) hole just here...
...so that you can access the rotary switch easily.
Next, tap the two pin holes (between the thick black band and the thin green line, on both sides of the aluminum sheath) using an 8-32 (M4) tap. (See the photo showing where to cut the plastic housing above.) It's best to do the tapping with plastic housing and blade holder inserted, to insure you get a smooth thread through the two layers of aluminum. NOTE: As Grayven pointed out, it's important to make sure the main power switch is depressed when inserting or removing the plastic housing, or you risk breaking the tip off! Here's an unnaturally posed photo showing the set screw being screwed into place with an Allen wrench.
When you insert the plastic housing and blade holder (make sure that power switch is pushed down!!), you need to make sure the original Construction Kit power switch and RGB switch are properly aligned in the sheath, so you can screw the cover back on. At the same time, you need to make sure the tapped holes of the blade holder are perfectly aligned with the tapped holes in the aluminum sheath.
I suppose this is obvious, but you can only insert the housing from the emitter end.
Screw the switch cover back on, screw in the two retention screws for the blade holder, and you're almost done.
Now you just need to drill and tap a hope for the blade retention screw. You can try to drill a hole in the sheath that matches the pre-tapped hole in the blade holder, but that can be tricky. It's probably easier to drill a new hole straight through both aluminum surfaces in a different spot (say, on the side opposite the pre-tapped hole of the blade holder). Either way, you are going to need to use another set screw (so that it will be flush with the surface of the sheath, and not get in the way of the cosmetic pieces), and the screw should be about 3/8" (10mm) long. Shorter, and it won't be able to retain the blade. Longer, and it won't be flush with the sheath, and will interfere with the cosmetic pieces.
That's it! You now have a Force FX Construction with 15 color variations, a removable blade (of whatever length and thickness you choose), and a sturdy aluminum hilt that should stand up well to light dueling. You probably realized this already, but the original 3-position RGB switch now simply changes sounds (between Jedi and Sith), and has no effect on blade color.
For a final touch, so that you can change colors on the fly, without removing the cosmetic sections, you can drill a small (3/16" or 5mm) hole in the spot on each of these sections that corresponds with the position of the rotary switch:
The hole has to be just large enough to accommodate a small flathead screwdriver. I haven't actually done it here, but I plan to.
Hope this was coherent and comprehensible.
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Originally Posted by Invisas1979
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