There's a lot to learn to building a saber with lights and sound. The first thing that you need to know is that there are three main websites for custom saber building for yourself (other than The RPF of course). They are (in no particular order)
Imperial Royal Arms (IRA for short),
FX-Sabers (FX for short) and
The Custom Saber Shop Forum (TCSS for short) (the latter of which also has a
store site). There are some other forums out there but these are the biggies. These three forums have tons of tutorials to get you started. Of course if the terminology in those tutorials is something that you don't understand, I recommend Google-ing the word or asking in a forum post, what that specific term means. You might find a thread that posts a glossary of terms but that type of thread may be hard to find.
The second thing you need to know is that there are some severe politics/competitive business tactics in the custom saber world. This means that certain vendors and their "fan bo..., er affliates/associates, may only promote vendor X, sabersmith X and website X and may never mention vendor Y, sabersmith Y or website Y (at least in a positive light, lol), even though both X and Y may have awesome products and customer service. Fortunately I am impartial when it comes to giving out references, even if it's in regards to a sabersmith or forum that may rub me the wrong way. That's because I believe people should make up their minds on their own and not just take mine or anyone else's word for it. Plus, a sabersmith's attitude or business ethics (or lack thereof) towards competitors may not necessarily be a factor for some when deciding whether or not to do business with them. Anywho, because of said politics, along with the mass amounts of info one needs to learn, means that you really need to be doing the research yourself by reading, reading and then reading some more, on all the forums out there (you don't need to join the forums to be able to read their content).
Again, because of said politics and business practices, certain websites have restrictions on who or what can be mentioned on them. For example, TCSS has a store site linked to it meaning that you cannot sell there or solicit anyone to make or sell you something there. I think they also may have a sabersmith or two that you can't talk about there. FX-Sabers won't allow you to mention a certain few sabersmith's there unless it's a specific question about one of their products. Imperial Royal Arms allows you to talk about any sabersmith (and their products) there, even if they are banned from that forum, no matter what they may have done, as long as you are not bashing them. I'm not stating that any of these rules on any of these forums are unecessary or wrong in some way and I'm also not saying that they're necessary or right. That's for each person to decide for themselves. I'm just saying that these are rules that they have in place and that you need to be aware of them.
FX-Sabers and IRA both have a list of sabersmiths that offer their services. Because of the afore mentioned politics, only a few offer their services on both forums. Both forums have some very talented sabersmiths that crank out excellent products. TCSS sells everything one needs to build a custom saber. For the saber itself, they have a modular parts system called MHSv1 and MHSv2. The main hilt parts all screw together like a flashlight and can be mixed and matched to make your own "look". TCSS also sells all the individual electronics and blade materials needed to make a complete saber. If for some reason one wanted to buy all the electronics elsewhere, there's always electronics parts websites such as
mouser.com and
digikey.com as well as ebay.
Some saber smiths have a product line of sabers that they mass produce for sale. Usually they outsource to China for this. This allows them to sell their sabers for much cheaper than what most saber smiths can afford to sell theirs for. The two main sabersmiths/vendors that do this are Saber Forge and Ultra Sabers. For these two vendors, I cannot stress strongly enough that one should research their customer service feedback on various websites, before purchasing anything from them. You have been warned.
When it comes to movie/cartoon replica sabers, there are many sabersmiths to choose from and the price and quality/accuracy will vary. Some of the smiths on RPF, IRA and FX offer movie and cartoon saber replicas and/or parts for them.
If you decide to machine your own hilts from scratch, a good place for raw materials and hardware are local metal supply shops, local hardware stores (like Home Depot, Lowes and even better yet, True Value and Ace Hardware),
onlinemetals.com,
speedymetals.com and
mcmaster.com (the latter of which also sells hardware (nuts, bolts, etc), polycarbonate tube for blades and acetal for chassis parts). ebay is also good for electronics and hardware. A good place for lathe and mill parts are
Enco,
The Little Machine Shop, and ebay as well as the various machining equipment vendors like Jet, Grizzly, etc.
The main vendors of sound boards are
Naigon’s Electronic Creations and
Plecter Labs. Naigon sells the Spark, Spark Color and Igniter series of sound boards (as well as a nice LED called the Z6) and Erv of Plecter Labs sells the Nano Biscotte, Petite Crouton, PRISM, Crystal Focus and Crystal Focus LS (LS = for use with LED string blades) series of sound boards (as well as the nice Blaster Core sound boards for blasters). He also sells the Crystal Shard series (which I think feature wise is somewhere between a Nano Biscotte and a Petite Crouton *shrugs*) but only to specific sabersmiths and those are only sold by those sabersmiths in completed sabers. The Plecter Labs sound boards can also be bought from the TCSS store site. Naigon does business on both IRA and FX but mostly on IRA. Erv is mainly on FX but will occasionally pop up on IRA and TCSS. While all these boards come with several sound fonts, additional sound fonts for these sound boards can be purchased from various sound font makers on the forums and from saberfont.com. Ultra Sabers sells a soundboard called the Obsidian and have their own fonts for it. I'm not sure what sound boards are in Saber Forge sabers but I believe some of them may be Naigon's Electronic Creations sound boards where as others of Saber Forge's are based off the old Ultrasound/Novasound and Nuetrino sound boards (these three boards do not allow you to switch out sound fonts via an SD card like all the rest do). As far as I know, Saber Forge does not sell sound boards separately (though he used to, back in the day).
I hope this helps. If you have any questions for me, please ask and I'll answer as best as I can. I'm not the most knowledgeable around here when it comes to custom sabers (especially movie replica versions as I'm a more of a "custom machined" kind of guy) but I know my fair share.
