Tom’s 2024 Zeiss Ikon Custom saber

thd9791

Master Member
RPF PREMIUM MEMBER
So.. I had a moment of inspiration staring at this flash unit. Those black Zeiss Ikon ones have a very prequel style bulb socket. It’s a separate section, it’s chrome, kinda council saber like.. I kind of wanted to keep it. But the T track never looked right on the body.

In comes a random thick walled Delrin tube I had lying around. (I made a bone folder for an ex out of some scrap I bought) and lo and behold… it’s easy to machine!

I made a few patterns on cut down pieces.. short enough to lathe. I don’t have a tube live center (need to get one or make one)

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So… when looking at the saber, I decided to use painters tape to map out ideas
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Next post.. pattern in action
 
I took inspiration from both Obi Wan and Qui Gons lightsabers. Since those also had machined inner pieces!

I decided to start with the corners of the shapes.. and drill them out. Big drill bits and dremels have a lot of torque and I kinda give up trying to hold to tolerances by hand sometimes lol

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These were the starter holes.. and then I opened them up

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And after some very ugly dremel and metal file work, we have a rough pattern!

I did have to reduce the diameter of the Delrin to snug fit in the tube, that took forever
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Fantastic work so far! I have a Zeiss that's been sitting around for years and I never cracked how to make it work.
 
I think it was a Zeiss saber waaaay back early in this threadt that sucked my into custom flash sabers to begin with. I have a Zeiss saber and an untouched one. They look so cool. They are shockingly flimsy.
 
I should always remember things like.. E6000 needs oxygen to cure. If you make a snug fit it may stay wet and not glue anything together. This happened at the neck, so I tried to run a threaded rod through the whole thing. Unfortunately, I forgot drilling through Bakelite and copper plates is usually a disaster.. so I admit I was wrong in thinking this would be straightforward.

The nice thing is I took some discs from this adding machine I ripped apart and trimmed them for emitter parts, including a carved down hex nut

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The threaded rod… the saber itself looks less pretty but I have a feeling I’ll be able to get creative with a pommel end and wrap it all up.. I jammed an aluminum tube in there for support when the Bakelite cracked
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Okay, so I still had structural issues so I kinda disassembled my last attempt. I realized if I cut it shorter, a pommel would leave it the same length as the Obi Wan TPM. So I made a pommel on my lathe out of two V8 kit castings and some aluminum! T nuts were important here.
Then that left the emitter, which I swapped part of the neck out with this aluminum flange I found years ago and saved. Except I lathed one end smaller! Really helps with the flow of the design, especially eliminating the “pommel” neck
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