My Lightsaber builds (V2, Heiland, and Graflex)

SwampFox

New Member
Hi everyone,
I've been a no named lurker on the site for a long time and finally came around to joining the forum about a year ago when I got more into prop building. Since then I've stayed lurking, but now I have a few builds that I'd like to share so this is my first post and my introduction to everyone. I've posted some of these builds over on fx-sabers as well so a few of you might recognize these, but my son's interests are starting to branch out past lightsabers and into blasters and costumes so I want to start sharing what I'm working on with you guys as well!

A little background first, my son is 3 years old and is of course a huge Star Wars fan. He wanted his own lightsabers, so over the past year or so he's worked little by little as his attention would hold on these couple of builds. They were slow going since he'd only want to be out in the garage for like half hour stretches, so if my updates come slow please forgive me.

First up, our Luke ROTJ V2-
The first one we tried was a custom machined V2. It was one of my favorites as a kid so I was happy when my son wanted to build this one first. We started with a piece of 1 1/2" OD aluminum tube, and some 2" solid round bar and after a little time on the lathe here's how it came out:
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The plan was to go with basically a two piece design with a stainless chassis that held both halves together so I could slide the saber open for recharging. It worked out pretty good and gave us a solid frame to hold everything together:
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Next up was a weathering, I used a combination of aluminum black and satin black paint to weather it. I went much more weathered than the actual prop, as much as I love the V2 I think with all the beating it looks like it's had it should be a little more blackened and scratched so I went heavy on the aluminum black and sanding. After it was weathered and it looked like we wanted it to, we started the wiring. I used a NBv3 board with a recharge port, bass speaker from TCSS and a Tri-Cree G/G/W wired in parallel.

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I also cut some windows through the chassis as well as the body to shine through the graflex clamp. Not a real crystal chamber, but when it's on you can see the green accent LED lighting up with wiring and board inside, it's kind of a cool effect:
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He loves it!
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Next up- Heiland Vader.
The next one we wanted to try was a Vader saber. I didn't have the cash for an MPP but found a good round hole 2 cell heiland on ebay for 15 bucks, so I picked that up and figured we could make it work, here it is in the hipster Instagram picture the old lady took while I wasn't looking:
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The plan for this one was to have a full aluminum chassis and crystal chamber, with all of the wiring hidden and the board underneath a brass access panel. I wanted it to look from the outside like a regular static prop, but look very clean if you opened it for recharging, like how I imagine Vader would have wanted it. I started out by laying out the chassis with the access holes that I envisioned:
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Next I made the access cover, and cut the 2 cell in half so I could extend it to 3 cell length. I used some chromed brass sink tube, matched perfectly:
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Next was making an end cap so make it look like it was always a 3 cell:
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After we were happy with how it looked from the outside, we got to making the chamber. I used 1/8" brass sheet, cut it into squares and turned it down on the lathe for a radiator section. Then I used 3/32" brass tube and put two in between each window, that let me thread the wiring from the NBv3 to the LED's without any visible wires:
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After that, we got it all wired and tidied up and we're good to go. I still have to finish up the shroud, the wiring and a few little things, but here are a few finished pics as of now:
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That's most of what I have for now. Next up I'm working on a Luke ROTJ Hero with a collet system to clamp the blade, and I have a Graflex 3 cell that's waiting for me to do a TFA crystal chamber build. I want to do a CF in that one so that'll have to wait until the budget allows. Here are some sneak peaks:
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Thanks so much for looking, and thanks for this great forum. The amount of knowledge on this board is amazing, and some of the props you guys turn out are incredible. Just looking through the threads in here gives me so many ideas for things to build with the kid, and inspires me to branch out and build more. I'm happy to be a part of it! I'll keep posting updates as I go to the projects.
 
Thanks very much for the kind words guys!

I don't have much to add today, I started out on the Hero Neck but didn't get far before other duties pulled me out of the garage. Also now that the hilt is done enough that my son can fight with it, I have also gotten back to working slowly on figuring out how to use the exactra circuit board as a PLI or an accent for the Heiland vader. I picked up an exactra 21 on ebay, eventually it'll get swapped for a 19 with the correct bubble strip but this will be an ok stand in for now. So far I can get it powered outside of the calculator card with 3.7V, and turned on in all 0's, but I'm doing some reading and thought it might be cool to have it act as a bargraph PLI, I'll get back to you when that's done and in the hilt:
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Panaflex and Obiwan, thanks very much!

I've got another update that's not earth shattering. Still working on the ROTJ Hero, but the neck isn't quite done. I should have some pictures to share of that by the end of this weekend barring any disasters. I did pick up what seems to me like an ok start to a blaster project in an auction last week. The auction didn't mention Denix or DL-44, so I was able to nab it for pretty cheap, and it looks to me like a Denix. It has the BKA 221 diamond on it so that's what made me think a European Denix, but I'm no expert I'm sure many of you know exactly what this thing is. This weekend the son and I will be breaking it down, stripping it and cleaning up all of these gross soft edges on the casting and re-milling the pockets. Someone already drilled a hole in the side of it, but the plan is to make a Hoth DL-44 out of this and the scope mount should cover it. I ordered up the aluminum to turn the flash hider and I'm going to make my own scope mount and maybe try and turn a scope out of brass myself, if that doesn't work a resin scope will do. I'm on the hunt for a blaster core and I have a small red laser diode to run off of 3.7V to embed in the flash hider, should be fun!

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Ok I've got a few more saber update pictures to share today, slowly working towards getting the blade clamping system worked out for the Luke ROTJ Hero. I showed you guys a few posts up that I already made the body and the emitter section, so this weekend I wrapped up the main neck piece and the copper chunk. I realized as I was making it that I don't love how thin the aluminum is on the thin neck under the copper, so I'll probably rethink that and maybe make a second version. The copper is a slip fit with only like 0.002" per side so it's tight, I'm hoping it gives the neck some strength when it's all tightened down.

Here was the trickiest part, the main neck piece. I roughed it out of solid 2" aluminum round and drilled a 0.200" through hole in the center. Don't mind the horrible stringy chips in the background or terrible surface finish... I made a cut with the wrong tool and it didn't break the chips and it swung around and screwed up my finish. I fixed it after this picture.
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Then I did all the threading so it would thread into the main body and the emitter would thread onto the top, separated it and here's what should hold the neck together:
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After that I didn't take any in progress picture of the copper and threading the body or emitter, but here are all the pieces to the neck:
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Now I'm working on cutting the taper in the emitter to make the blade holder collet, hopefully it works like I'm thinking it will because I'm definitely not drilling through that sweet shiny hero finish to put a set screw! Thanks for looking guys.
 
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