This has been a slow-going side project for a while now as I was working on my cast ANH Kenobi stunts, and really a test of how far I can push myself with foundry casting in terms of shapes and what I can do with different alloys. This is by way an extension of my Palpatine robe project and was spurred to completion with Hecubus114 RotS Sidious thread. I don't know what it is lately, but I've been on a bit of a Palpy-kick lately. I think it's because of Return of the Jedi's 40th anniversary this May and for the longest time, RotJ was my go-to Star Wars film. It may also be due to the fact that it will be 20 years of Revenge of the Sith in a couple years, too, so that might have something to do with it.
I originally was going to do just the "V2" Palpatine/Yoda duel hilt or, rather, this particular prototype pictured below. As it is with me, unfortunately, I am easily swept up by the winds of impulse. The more I looked into the ones made for production, I started toying with the idea of doing the "Hero," as well. Though, never having seen what electrum looks like in person, and what I could find online, it looks just like polished bronze. Bronze is something I can forge. Or, at least, attempt to. However, I'll get to that later...
Before we go on, here's the terminology I coined for the parts of the hilt just so we're all on the same page, using the photo on the left, top-down:
First thing's first: I had to make a buck for the hilt and the parts that I was going to cast. Anything else missing, I knew I could machine. After deciding on making both the "hero" and the "V2," I figured that the endcap and puck for both hilts would be bronze rather than brass. I actually went and acquired enough copper and zinc, and tin, to cast both brass and bronze, but the bronze I wanted to try first before I tried making brass. Ultimately, I scrapped the idea of casting my own brass after the turnout of my bronze and bought some online for the emitter and rib section for both hilts.
I based the measurements of my sculpt off of the numbers provided by Propstore when they auctioned the Hero prop some years back and, originally, my buck started life as nothing more than styrene and wads of foil just to get a sense of shape and the feel of the hilt in my hand. I found it much too small and uncomfortable in the hand, it being completely round and rather quite thin. After taking into consideration the amount of warping and shrinkage from my previous casting trials, the idea of changing the proportions of my buck to accommodate those changes was already there. I figured then, why not go all the way and change all the things I don't like about the real props? I was already doing that with the use of bronze for some elements.
It may not be clear in my photos above, but the overall shape of the hilt was altered to be more oblong and "squished" so that the grip would be more ergonomic. I also added a bit more girth to the hilt just so it felt more satisfying in hand. I wanted it to feel as good in my hand as my favorite chef's knife, which the grip bore great resemblance and shape to. The rest were minor cosmetic tweaks, like keeping the bottom profile of the grip, leading into the end cap, rounded instead of flat to preserve the silhouette of hilt shape; keeping more in line with the concept art. It means that the port on the bottom of the hilt won't lay flush and sit straight, but after playing in the clunky, odd, and slap-shod world of the OT hilts, the fidelity in two mismatching things butting up against another just looks right, now. Asymmetry is beautiful.
Pictured below is how the casts initially came out with some minor cleaning. You can just make out just how rough the bronze came out. A result due mainly to my own ignorance and inexperience with casting bronze. This, after all, was my first ever attempt at doing it, and I'm sure my faults in the castings were due mainly to temperature. Rather, a lack of it; I don't believe I got the melt to the optimal pouring temperature (~1125 C) before I poured it. The big bronze nugget where the puck for the bronze hilt should be is a result of my realizing the metal was not hot enough during my pour and I had to dump it into my ingot mold I was saving for the brass. This was the lesson that put me off from following up with a brass melt.
To keep it short, the rest of the time was on cleaning the casts as there was much cleaning needed to be done. It didn't help that I kept bumbling along every step of the way.
I believed at first, I would just stick to making that prototype I mentioned earlier, but the more I looked into it, the more the V2 used in RotS won me over, little by little, as I worked on cleaning the casts. There were still things I wasn't really fond of on the real prop: the flat paint scheme and Covertec wheel on the back, the erect-nipple LEDs that jutted from the grip section. I knew I wanted to change these things, but I didn't anticipate just how much the final results would win me over.
There are little cosmetic changes that I made from the real prop that just gives my hilt so much texture, a more robust flavor; things that just suit my tastes to a 't.' Asymmetry worked its way into the ribs, and while I didn't intentionally cut them asymmetrically, I wasn't trying to make them symmetric either. It was such a natural feeling thing, I can't better describe it. Especially after intentionally working to nail that detail on the Luke V2's for years. It's not right for the hilt I'm replicating, but it's right for me. Same goes for the gills; I left them untouched. No sanding, no bluing. I left them raw and it feels so good. That was what guided me most through making these hilts: whatever felt right, I did. Even if it was deviating off of the measurements I was working from, and moving further away from being "accurate."
My ribs are uneven, the angles of my cone aren't steep enough, the emitter neck is too narrow, and I completely did away with the Covertec wheel (though I'm still humming-and-hawing over making one in brass and blackening it to add later), and I'm still proud of every choice I made with this hilt.
I'm actually quite embarrassed to share this to the forum. This is, honestly, one of the ugliest, most disappointing things I've ever endured making. I honestly don't know if the lessons learned from making this warranted all the wasted resources and effort.
My cast wasn't just bad, it was terrible. The bronze hilt needed so much work, and I had to take so much material off this hilt just to get to a point where it was salvageable. By then, I had to adjust portions of the hilt because of all the material had been lost and make up in the size difference between the Hero and the V2 in other places.
The blowholes just got deeper and bigger the more I cleaned the surface. There was no saving or repairing it. It reached a point where I just had to work with it as much as I could. You can see it in the photos. The surface is so pockmarked, I can't get a clear polished surface due to the grain structure of the bronze. In some of the larger craters, I had to use a slip made of CA glue and brass powder to fill it in a sad attempt to hide it (it didn't work).
I even attempted to do a faux silver inlay in the grips by using silver-tin solder, thinking the copper in the bronze would help it bond. BIG, fat "nope" on that one. I wasted 80 bucks worth of it, in three failed attempts, before I had to resort to foil tape. It's such an ugly and ghetto solution. It took way too long for me to cut a pattern in foil tape to have it lay over the curved surfaces of the grip with minimal wrinkling, and keep from maring into oblivion. Fun fact: Foil tape can't be buffed, but can be polished.
The silver-tin would not take and what did would just flake away while I tried to clean and polish it. Worse yet, all my annealing of the bronze from this trial caused my bronze to soften to a severe degree. Freshly cast, this thing was so hard that sanding it was an issue. After my failed silver inlaying, this thing dented and dinged inside soft jaws in my vice. It was so far along in my constructing of it, that when I noticed, it would've been too much of a paint to strip it back to pieces and it was another thing I just had to roll with.
Unlike my V2, the group cluster above the grip is not fastened together by anything to each other. The bronze was far too difficult to work with initially. On the V2, it was manageable because the only bronze pieces were the cone and the puck, and I managed to drill and tap those in my lathe. I could do it on the Hero, too, but it was not a possibility on either my lathe or mini-mill to drill and tap the depth I needed to in the grip.They are fastened together with nothing but CA glue and epoxy. Brass and bronze bond really well together.
I also had exhausted what little bronze I had. There could be no more foul ups and what was left over was in pretty rough shape. As a result, to try and clean this up as much as possible, the cone on my Hero is smaller than the V2, on top of there being an uneven cut on its base where I had to cut it away from another piece; the puck is a little wider and taller on my Hero than the V2 to make up for the material ground away on the grip. I wound up buying a small piece of bronze online (expensive for the size, too) in case I wanted to remake a certain element. Being the masochist that I am, I thought it was only right to use all of my scratch-made pieces, good or bad, as a reminder to myself of what I had endured and suffered in making this.
If there's anything I positively took away from this, it's the level of sheen and polish I managed to get on the bronze (it's mirror-reflective in some areas) and should I need to find some way to repurpose this, I can use the lightsaber as a baby weight. For its size, it's incredibly dense, being around 1.5 kg.
The main lesson anyone reading this should be thus: Should there be a good, machine-made, mass-produced, accurate replica of this hilt to hit the market, buy it!
I originally was going to do just the "V2" Palpatine/Yoda duel hilt or, rather, this particular prototype pictured below. As it is with me, unfortunately, I am easily swept up by the winds of impulse. The more I looked into the ones made for production, I started toying with the idea of doing the "Hero," as well. Though, never having seen what electrum looks like in person, and what I could find online, it looks just like polished bronze. Bronze is something I can forge. Or, at least, attempt to. However, I'll get to that later...
- The piece at the end of the hilt: "End cap", or "nipple"
- The hilt body: or "grip", which is then covered in the "wrapping," which then also has a copper "port" at one end, and "gills" cut into it under the LEDs
- The block at the top of the grip section: the "puck"
- The section on top of the puck: the "ribs"
- The section capping the ribs: the "cone"
- The post at the top of the cone: the "emitter"
First thing's first: I had to make a buck for the hilt and the parts that I was going to cast. Anything else missing, I knew I could machine. After deciding on making both the "hero" and the "V2," I figured that the endcap and puck for both hilts would be bronze rather than brass. I actually went and acquired enough copper and zinc, and tin, to cast both brass and bronze, but the bronze I wanted to try first before I tried making brass. Ultimately, I scrapped the idea of casting my own brass after the turnout of my bronze and bought some online for the emitter and rib section for both hilts.
I based the measurements of my sculpt off of the numbers provided by Propstore when they auctioned the Hero prop some years back and, originally, my buck started life as nothing more than styrene and wads of foil just to get a sense of shape and the feel of the hilt in my hand. I found it much too small and uncomfortable in the hand, it being completely round and rather quite thin. After taking into consideration the amount of warping and shrinkage from my previous casting trials, the idea of changing the proportions of my buck to accommodate those changes was already there. I figured then, why not go all the way and change all the things I don't like about the real props? I was already doing that with the use of bronze for some elements.
It may not be clear in my photos above, but the overall shape of the hilt was altered to be more oblong and "squished" so that the grip would be more ergonomic. I also added a bit more girth to the hilt just so it felt more satisfying in hand. I wanted it to feel as good in my hand as my favorite chef's knife, which the grip bore great resemblance and shape to. The rest were minor cosmetic tweaks, like keeping the bottom profile of the grip, leading into the end cap, rounded instead of flat to preserve the silhouette of hilt shape; keeping more in line with the concept art. It means that the port on the bottom of the hilt won't lay flush and sit straight, but after playing in the clunky, odd, and slap-shod world of the OT hilts, the fidelity in two mismatching things butting up against another just looks right, now. Asymmetry is beautiful.
Pictured below is how the casts initially came out with some minor cleaning. You can just make out just how rough the bronze came out. A result due mainly to my own ignorance and inexperience with casting bronze. This, after all, was my first ever attempt at doing it, and I'm sure my faults in the castings were due mainly to temperature. Rather, a lack of it; I don't believe I got the melt to the optimal pouring temperature (~1125 C) before I poured it. The big bronze nugget where the puck for the bronze hilt should be is a result of my realizing the metal was not hot enough during my pour and I had to dump it into my ingot mold I was saving for the brass. This was the lesson that put me off from following up with a brass melt.
To keep it short, the rest of the time was on cleaning the casts as there was much cleaning needed to be done. It didn't help that I kept bumbling along every step of the way.
The Good: The "V2"
...The "Great," really. The following section will be divided into two parts, by order of what I'm proudest of most. I suppose after my work making Luke V2's, it should be no wonder that my proudest achievement in all of my time working with metal turns out to be this "V2." It is not hyperbole when I say that I think this may be the most beautiful thing I have ever physically made. It's not that impressive of a thing but, for someone that just started this type of work five years ago, I would be shocked if someone held this up to me and told me then when I started, that I would make something like this. I'm just so proud of this.
I believed at first, I would just stick to making that prototype I mentioned earlier, but the more I looked into it, the more the V2 used in RotS won me over, little by little, as I worked on cleaning the casts. There were still things I wasn't really fond of on the real prop: the flat paint scheme and Covertec wheel on the back, the erect-nipple LEDs that jutted from the grip section. I knew I wanted to change these things, but I didn't anticipate just how much the final results would win me over.
There are little cosmetic changes that I made from the real prop that just gives my hilt so much texture, a more robust flavor; things that just suit my tastes to a 't.' Asymmetry worked its way into the ribs, and while I didn't intentionally cut them asymmetrically, I wasn't trying to make them symmetric either. It was such a natural feeling thing, I can't better describe it. Especially after intentionally working to nail that detail on the Luke V2's for years. It's not right for the hilt I'm replicating, but it's right for me. Same goes for the gills; I left them untouched. No sanding, no bluing. I left them raw and it feels so good. That was what guided me most through making these hilts: whatever felt right, I did. Even if it was deviating off of the measurements I was working from, and moving further away from being "accurate."
My ribs are uneven, the angles of my cone aren't steep enough, the emitter neck is too narrow, and I completely did away with the Covertec wheel (though I'm still humming-and-hawing over making one in brass and blackening it to add later), and I'm still proud of every choice I made with this hilt.
- Cast in a356 Aluminium, with cast bronze and machined brass pieces, all finished to a satin "ruff-buff," brushed metal texture.
- Cold-blued the alu and bronze to a rich, smokey color, including the brass hex screws in the end cap. Though the details on the end cap aren't picked up very well in the photos, it's darkened with a gradient effect, fading into the polished tip of the nipple.
- Port is a red brass plumbing part that was cut down, soldered at one end, and screwed into the hilt.
- Emitter, cone, ribs, and puck are secured over a threaded M8 rod that goes into the upper portion of the grip (but it's mostly copious amounts of CA and epoxy that's holding it all tight).
The Bad: The "Hero"
I had to learn this the hard way: Bronze is denser than steel. I wasn't aware and this made for a hellish machining experience right from the start. Slowly but surely, I adjusted and learned to machine it alright, but it was rough going for a while. Not only was my casting sub-par, but exactly how bad the bronze was revealed itself to me, more and more, as I worked on it. The end result is a "poor man's" Hero Palpatine hilt, which is a real insult to me because this was anything but cheap to make. It took way more effort and resources than I expected.
I'm actually quite embarrassed to share this to the forum. This is, honestly, one of the ugliest, most disappointing things I've ever endured making. I honestly don't know if the lessons learned from making this warranted all the wasted resources and effort.
My cast wasn't just bad, it was terrible. The bronze hilt needed so much work, and I had to take so much material off this hilt just to get to a point where it was salvageable. By then, I had to adjust portions of the hilt because of all the material had been lost and make up in the size difference between the Hero and the V2 in other places.
The blowholes just got deeper and bigger the more I cleaned the surface. There was no saving or repairing it. It reached a point where I just had to work with it as much as I could. You can see it in the photos. The surface is so pockmarked, I can't get a clear polished surface due to the grain structure of the bronze. In some of the larger craters, I had to use a slip made of CA glue and brass powder to fill it in a sad attempt to hide it (it didn't work).
I even attempted to do a faux silver inlay in the grips by using silver-tin solder, thinking the copper in the bronze would help it bond. BIG, fat "nope" on that one. I wasted 80 bucks worth of it, in three failed attempts, before I had to resort to foil tape. It's such an ugly and ghetto solution. It took way too long for me to cut a pattern in foil tape to have it lay over the curved surfaces of the grip with minimal wrinkling, and keep from maring into oblivion. Fun fact: Foil tape can't be buffed, but can be polished.
The silver-tin would not take and what did would just flake away while I tried to clean and polish it. Worse yet, all my annealing of the bronze from this trial caused my bronze to soften to a severe degree. Freshly cast, this thing was so hard that sanding it was an issue. After my failed silver inlaying, this thing dented and dinged inside soft jaws in my vice. It was so far along in my constructing of it, that when I noticed, it would've been too much of a paint to strip it back to pieces and it was another thing I just had to roll with.
Unlike my V2, the group cluster above the grip is not fastened together by anything to each other. The bronze was far too difficult to work with initially. On the V2, it was manageable because the only bronze pieces were the cone and the puck, and I managed to drill and tap those in my lathe. I could do it on the Hero, too, but it was not a possibility on either my lathe or mini-mill to drill and tap the depth I needed to in the grip.They are fastened together with nothing but CA glue and epoxy. Brass and bronze bond really well together.
I also had exhausted what little bronze I had. There could be no more foul ups and what was left over was in pretty rough shape. As a result, to try and clean this up as much as possible, the cone on my Hero is smaller than the V2, on top of there being an uneven cut on its base where I had to cut it away from another piece; the puck is a little wider and taller on my Hero than the V2 to make up for the material ground away on the grip. I wound up buying a small piece of bronze online (expensive for the size, too) in case I wanted to remake a certain element. Being the masochist that I am, I thought it was only right to use all of my scratch-made pieces, good or bad, as a reminder to myself of what I had endured and suffered in making this.
If there's anything I positively took away from this, it's the level of sheen and polish I managed to get on the bronze (it's mirror-reflective in some areas) and should I need to find some way to repurpose this, I can use the lightsaber as a baby weight. For its size, it's incredibly dense, being around 1.5 kg.
The main lesson anyone reading this should be thus: Should there be a good, machine-made, mass-produced, accurate replica of this hilt to hit the market, buy it!
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