The time has come for me to start seriously thinking about ‘skinning up’ these cores. To that end I decided to review my dimensioned drawing against the available pictures. This is has been on my mind since Kurtyboy did a quick CAD mock up & overlay & informed me some of my placements were out – specifically the switch & glass eye placements.
Scaling looks to be a art as much as a science so what I present here has to be view as an interpretation & not a canon. Just as any scaling should be. (Just to be clear ; I am no newcomer to scaling & have learned many wrinkles & sidesteps for when the going gets tough & some of these photo’s are tough.)
This is why I’m doing this long-ish post to show you how I arrived at the values I have.
In all cases I was drawing with a pencil directly onto my laptop’s (Matt) screen & using a fine division ruler to measure. I enlarged the image as big as would completely fit in the window them put a mark on the edges of the distance to be measured then measured. Id did this several times for each image taking tube then clamp as base factors &, in most cases, an inside & outside of a blurred edge as well as a best guess one. The sets of measures below have been selected from these as they show similarly & are from between extremes of scaled values. As each picture was taken in a different manner & may be a picture of a picture (eg I’ve been told the hut scene one was a picture taken of 50” plasma screen) I could think of no other way to compensate for this across them.
I haven't included the promo picture of the black nose stunt. There is too much perspective, it’s actually quite blurry when enlarged & the buttons are angled too much in profile for me to place their centers with any certainty.
(note; for those not familiar – a scale factor 1 is life size more than 1 means the image I’m using is larger than life less means smaller.)
PDF of my latest drawing is attached at end of post. [Having seen all the fancy CAD schematics on the RPF, & remembering a late friend saying how easy it is, I downloaded FreeCAD (unaided!) to redo this. 1 1/2hrs later I’d succeeded… in drawing a rectangle! I then remembered why I’d given up with CAD programs in the past. I’ll stick (again) with 3D modeling in my head & a sketch (literally most often) on the back of an envelope. ]
Key: .....................................................
Drawing value
A = front of tube to top button center – 2” [50.8mm]
B = front of tube to base of cut off – 1 3/8” [35mm]
C = base of cut off to center of glass eye – 1 1/2” [38.1mm]
D = base of tube (pommel) to center of switch hole – 3” [76.2mm]
E = base of tube to center of wires hole – 1” [25.4mm]
Ref 1:
This is the best resolution picture I have which is why I started here. Unfortunately it only shows the front of the hilt. Because of the good resolution and lack of perspective this scaled quite consistently every way I tried it – these are ‘mid-range’ ones that are closest to the others. (The minimum I had for the red button was exactly 50.8mm.)
Scale measure is the tube diam.
[Thumbs are example photo's of my screen showing, if you look very carefully, the thin pencil lines I use to measure.]
A; 51.5mm
B; 35.3mm
C; 38.1mm [scale]
D; -
E; -
Blade diam; 16.2mm
Ref 2;
This looks like a decent picture but I could not get it scaled consistently. If scaled from the tube diam the clamp length was wrong – if I used the tube diam at the front it wouldn’t give correct tube diam at the clamp. They differ considerably from the others. I give the results but have little faith in them, there is just too much perspective & distortion from the photo reproduction processes. [ a photo of a print from ?]
Note; This is the view Kurtyboy overlayed to that shown my switch position as short. From direct measure it can be seen that the pommel to switch center is exactly 3 times the distance of the pommel to wire hole center.
A; 49.48mm
B; -
C; -
D; 81mm
E; 27mm
Ref 3;
The classic hut shot. Shows everything but the switch position. Intermediate to difficult to scale as I have to enlarge a lot which gives a blurrier image than is good. Scaled using tube diam.
A: 51.3mm
B: 35.4mm
C: 38 mm [scale]
D: -
E: 25.7mm
Ref 4:
Forgotten where I borrowed this from. It does appear in Seth’s Saber bible. There is perspective here so I scaled for the red button from the tube diam between this button & the front. For the grip section I scaled from the clamp box length.
A: 51.2mm
B: -
C: -
D: 76.5mm
E: 25.5mm
From these I drew up the PDF schematic. It’s sort of irrelevant if my switch position is short or not for my build as I can’t move it forward without altering the core sleeve &/or motor position & driveshaft lengths, which I’m not going to do esp. in view of the above. I would also point out that I originally chose the core sleeve at 5” because this was the longest whole number of inches that would fit without the 310 motor hitting the switch base. Once the 370 motor is substituted same switch base is pretty much a depth stop for the whole core.
For me the whole thing looks to be made according to the most convenient & easily read imperial measures that get somewhere close rather than slavish copying of dim’s from an actual graflex. (In my 1st drawing I used a measurement for the red button taken from my repro Graflex, which now looks like it was a mistake to do.)
Due to the position of the infamous grub screw at the front I’m guessing this is for bearing retention & that in this instance they seem to be using an NK roller bearing 19 – 20mm long (3/4” = 19.1mm , so screw is 1/2 way at app 10mm on black nose promo shot – no hight involved so I can get this center reasonably well)
I’m using NK’s 16mm long which puts the groove 8mm back from the B-C angle.
). If you're wondering what I'm doing at the end I'm removing the motor retaining screw so the internals are a friction fit.
