Disney Store Kylo Ren lightsaber mods

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Hey all,
I wanted to share pics of my recently-completed DS Kylo saber mod... I've never done anything like this before and I'm quite happy with the results. I'm not gonna post a step-by-step of what I did, as most of my ideas and hints came from this thread (in particular I want to single out dmpsk8 for inspiring me to try this). I'll post three "finished" photos here, then post a bunch of process pics in another reply or two... feel free to ask me anything about what I did and I'll do my best to answer :)



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The basic process was,
- Remove top ring and blades (used a hairdryer to soften them).
- Snipped off the blade LEDs, leaving just the first bulb.
- Found a socket that fit snugly inside the main blade holder (18mm Tekton socket for ½" drive)... used epoxy to hold it in place.
- Shortened the black piece that held the long LED strip and inserted it into the base of the socket
- Dremeled out the cheesy "recessed" part of the saber and scratch-built a new one out of sheet styrene, toothpicks and some of the red tubing from a can of compressed air). Painted with flat black and dry-brushed. Added blue wires to finish it off.
- Airbrushed end cap with Alclad chrome and transparent red. Painted the "inside" with flat black and silver dry brushing.
- Covered both the scratch-built "guts" and the lower core piece with waxed paper.
- Base coat of Tamiya light grey primer (rattle can), then flat black (airbrushed). Side emitters were Alclad Steel, transparent blue, and copper
- Found a guy on the FX Sabers board that had the proper transparent wire, and I downloaded 3D files for the wire holders (had to print them at 110% as they were too small at 100%)
That's the basic steps I followed. Feel free to ask about anything.... I'll do my best to remember :)

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- - - Updated - - -

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Wow, Andy....that's a phenomenal job, brother! Those photos are the best; I haven't finished my Disney saber yet, but these photos give me new incentive and encouragement to finish my own! :D

Rob
 
My removable extended blade modification was a success! I did it several weeks ago but haven't posted about it yet. The entire blade is not complete and will be modded further but I'll post what I've done so far.

Outer blade
The blade is about 87 cm long and I went for a kind of budget solution by extending the blade with another Disney blade that I already had instead of buying expensive blades from overseas. The blade has an outer red part, a middle red part and a white inner part. By cutting the outer and middle blades at different lengths and putting clear glue inbetween I got a sturdy construction. In the picture I have marked the cut on the outer and the middle tubes. I actually put the blade sections in a lathe to get the cut straight. If the cut hadn't been very precise there might have been a small gap where light can shine through when putting the tubes together. The cut on the outer blade is kind of visible but it shows less when the blade is lit.
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Inner blade with stringblade
The extension for the white tube is just taped on since it's protected by the outer red part of the blade. Inside the white tube is the stringblade I made from 75 "regular" bright LEDs. The connection scheme for the original blade looks like in the picture below. On the original blade, the LEDs are mounted on a kind of circuit board but the principle is the same. In the bottom of the circuit board five cables are connected. (thesualc has some good photos of the inside, watch post #94, page 4 in this thread.) The brown cable is positive and the others are negative. So the red cable lights up first, then the orange, then yellow, then green, which makes the blade light up in sequence.
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I used the same buildup for my stringblade but with more LEDs. By using extender cables I connected the red cable to the negative of the first LED, the orange to the 20th LED, the yellow to the 39th and the green to the 58th. (The first three "sections" of the stringblade has 19 LEDs and the last has 18.) By adding power "along the way" in this fashion prevents the light from fading towards the tip, which it would have done in a "regular" parallel circuit.

Connector - blade
Moving on to the connector. I used the 3D-printed connector made by @thesualc, worked great! On the lower part of the white tube is the connector. The piece of red tube (taken from the middle tube of the blade) holds everything together (with glue) and along with the black plate (which comes with the saber) it helps aligning the connectors when inserting the blade into the hilt. The connector inside the hilt (painted black for less visibility) has a slit in which the black plate goes and the piece of tube goes around the connector. Note that the actual male and female connectors are bought, not printed. The piece of red tube and the white tube are held together with a piece of string (with some glue) which lets them move slightly relative to eachother which makes inserting the blade easier. Also, when pulling the blade out all the tension is in the string and none in the cables or the LEDs.
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Connector - hilt
Inside the hilt is a black cylinder into which the blade is inserted. Originally, there is like a black rod going across the inside. I sanded this down so I could insert the connector but kept a few millimeters because this prevents the blade from being pulled out when using the twist-lock mechanism. Because the space inside the black cylinder is so tight I had to make sure the connector was glued in place correctly. I did this by simply inserting the blade as the glue hardened, which kept the connector in place. The cylinder is made of two halves which are held together partly by the glue at the bottom of the connector but also by a cable tie. I guess you could just as well glue the halves together when gluing the connector.

Inserting the blade
The blade is inserted by first inserting the white tube (kept inside the outer tube) and then inserting the outer blade and twisting it 90 degrees. Only the outer part is twisted, the inside is not moving. The weird shape at the bottom of the red tube is because the shape on the piece of the rod I kept is kind of a plus shape. On the other side it is circular, as seen in the picture above.
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Lighting it up
The blade lights up pretty good, brighter than the original at least and there is almost no "dotted" effect from the LEDs being too far apart. It is kind of orange, I guess it is because both the blade and the LEDs are red. The side blades are actually lit up by the two original LEDs from the saber. To make them shine just as bright as the main blade I connected two cables to the green cable and led them to the negatives of each LED, where the black cables connect. Below is a picture of the whole saber for proportion. The side blades are just slightly inserted and will be about 1 cm shorter each when fully inserted. I might extend those too in some way later.
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Clip - hilt
I also made a belt clip so I can store the hilt in a belt. The raised block resembling a clip on the original saber is split in two parts with one part being on the battery hatch. That block is where I would place the clip and since I wanted the hatch to be removable I had to find out a way to make the block one coherent piece because the clip can't split up when I open the hatch. I laser cut some pieces of what I think is acrylic glass and glued them together and glued it in place on the hilt. For that last step I just had to remove a thin wall inside the hilt. By drilling a hole in the fake clip i got the structure seen below, with two holes where I could insert the actual clip. The clip is made from 1 mm thick water cut brass with two steel rods soldered into two holes on the brass. A piece of 2 mm thick acrylic glass keeps the clip distanced from the hilt so it can slide into the piece on the belt. Lastly I sanded off the entire part of the fake clip on the battery hatch, making a slot where the new clip fitted perfectly. In the pictures nothing is glued in place and the acrylic needs painting of course but it shows the function.
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Clip - belt
The belt part of the clip is also made of acrylic glass (2 mm) and glued in layers on top of each other. Even the bolts are laser cut but I realised two bolts are missing in the middle track. When pulling out the hilt the brass scratches the inside of the clip (right inner wall) so that part is reinforced with a strip of aluminium. The track in the middle is also reinforced on the sides with 1 mm hard plastic because of the fragility of the construction. It is highlighted in the leftmost picture.
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Seems the thread has been quiet a while but I'll post some updates.

In my previous post (the one replied to above) I showed how I made an extended and detachable blade, and a functioning belt clip. Here, I show what aesthetic modifications I did to the hilt and how I extended the sideblades.

Better pictures of the finished hilt are available at my DeviantArt page!

Firstly, two pictures of the unmodified hilt for reference.
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Some design choices are made so that I can open up the hilt completely if necessary, because I've had some issues with the electronics glitching every now and then.

Filling in, sanding etc.
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Where I filled in gaps etc. I used Milliput epoxy putty (yellow/beige in the pictures).

I sanded off relief text and most mould seams.

Sanded the whole hilt with a 400 grit sandpaper to make the paint stick better.

Mounted four 3D-printed clips for the red cable. (I did this before painting because I thought it would be sturdier than gluing them onto a layer of paint.)

Filled in the slot for the on/off switch, but left a small slit on the side, so I can stick in a paperclip and flip the switch if I need to.

Cleared up some space on the inside so the bigger speaker could fit and let the speaker element vibrate freely.

Filled in one screw hole near the bottom and two toward the top. I thought the upper ring, the sideblade cylinders and the screws under the battery cover would hold everything together anyway.

Screw hole inserts
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However, two screw holes near the bottom were still necessary. I lathed two small plastic cylinders that would fit in the holes and carved them to blend in with the hilt. I drilled a small hole in each that would be just visible enough so I could stick in a needle and pull them out if necessary. Each cylinder fits with a little friction and a small piece of sticky pad at the bottom.

Sideblade cylinders
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I put two little blocks of Milliput inside each sideblade cylinder. The cylinders have little wedges inside them so they can be snapped in place, but if you turn the cylinders they come off easily. The blocks prevent the cylinders from being turned, so they don't come off very easily unless I gently bend them off in the right angle. It required some fine tuning to get the blocks the right width and thickness to get a straight and tight fit.

Battery cover
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I cut off the upper part of the battery cover and mounted it on the hilt and filled in the gap with Milliput. I used a 3D-printed half cylinder piece (white) to bridge the gap between the hilt and the battery cover. Since I removed the screw holding the cover in place, I used two 1x4 LEGO plates on the inside to connect the cover and hilt.

Inner details
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For the hilt's inner details (or the "insert"), I firstly made a template out of thin cardboard (however, the real insert got small adjustments along the way). The cross section of the basic shape is basically like an octagon cut in half. I made it as tall as possible so it would fill out the inside and not show the edges at the top or bottom. I suggest making your own template to make sure it fits inside the blade, but I will give some advice on measurements below. There is a part inside the hilt (visible in the pictures) that is exactly 36 mm wide so it is a good idea to make the insert's "diameter" 36 mm so it will fit around this part.

The base of the insert is made from a credit card-style plastic card (without any relief text) which is laminated on both sides. This allowed me to cut parallel incisions halfway through the card and then break along the incisions, with the laminate holding it together in one piece on the back. With the aforementioned inner diameter of 36 mm, the distance between the incisions would be 15 mm (regardless of the card's thickness). I did all the cutting with a scalpel and steel ruler, which was really hard work. I guess some cuts, like the contour, can be done with scissors but with less precision.

To get the angles right I cut a piece of card in an octagonal shape and temporarily taped it perpendicular to the inside of the insert, then I put super glue in the incisions I had made in the card. Then I remade the octagonal piece of card into a thin "arch" and glued it to the inside of the insert. This was for extra stability and so the insert would lie correctly aligned inside the hilt. In fact, the insert lies snugly in there without any adhesives and without rattling around.

The details are made with pieces of card, toothpicks, Milliput, two pieces of blue translucent wire etc. and painted with acrylic paint.

Painting
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The hilt was first painted with a black NC spray paint (although a primer might have filled in some of the scratches). The details were then made with Humbrol enamel paints. The paint job was based on pictures of an apparent prototype of Propshop's Kylo Ren lightsaber (pictures of the actual product look a bit different). To get the worn look revealing the copper metal underneath I grounded with 191 Chrome Silver (to make the copper shine more) and topped it with a copper mixture, letting some of the silver show around the edges. The copper was a mixture of 51 Sunset Red and 171 Antique Bronze.

The sideblade cylinders are painted silver at the ends with a dry brushed fade towards the black. The burnt metal look is then made by carefully dry brushing 54 Brass, 51 Sunset Red and 52 Baltic Blue with a slight overlap, one color at a time, giving the paint about six hours to dry before applying the next color (dry brushing might otherwise smudge overlapping layers of paint). Practice is recommended! On a side note, I noticed that 16 Gold, 54 Brass and 171 Antique Bronze look virtually the same, not sure if they are supposed to considering the color on the lids are totally different.

With the details painted, I covered the whole hilt in Montana matte varnish. Then I painted the cable clips and the large silvery patch on the hilt with silver again to get a bit more shine on those details.

Extended sideblades
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I extended the sideblades a bit using an extra set of sideblades. I soldered the bottom part of one pair of sideblades to the bottom of the other pair. When cutting the parts, I dipped them in boiling water to soften up the plastic. I used a scalpel and made sure the edges of different parts would align, with no openings that would otherwise be hard to solder shut. I used a soldering iron with variable temperature, set a bit below 200°C to not burn the plastic, but that also made it a bit difficult to melt the plastic. Therefore, I also used boiling water to preheat the plastic before soldering. I practiced a bit with different temperatures and techniques on the parts that would not be used, and I'm satisfied with the result. The soldering work is not very visible when lighting up the lightsaber.


Now all I need is a nice stand and some inserts to make the blade orifices more accurate when not using the blades. Maybe in the future if I get access to a 3D-printer...

That's it, I will be happy to answer any questions!


P.S. I noticed that Disney Store released an updated version of the lightsaber in 2020 with detachable blades, I wish they had done that sooner! :lol:
 

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