Every Jedi Needs a Lightsaber
For years I’ve had a Darth Vader lightsaber and an Obi Wan Kenobi lightsaber hanging on my wall next to some classic Star Wars posters. Iconic as they are I always felt like I was missing the best green saber, the Luke Skywalker green lightsaber from Return of the Jedi. When I bought the ones for my wall I searched and never could find a good price for one. Recently my kids have started playing with them and I got that itch again to search for the missing green saber. What I found is that the custom lightsaber community has come a long way since I built my own out of sink parts in college. I tested the waters with a VHC lightsaber I found on amazon and the fire was lit. I definitely need my own lightsaber.
The amazon lightsaber was nice but it was lit from the hilt and not in the blade like the ones
I was used to. Poking around on reddit and discord I found Vire Sabers. Two mystery boxes later and my wife and I had new lightsabers to battle with the kids. As fun as they were I wanted to tinker a bit more than just with the sound files and I
ended up ordering a Proffie Board. When that arrived I got started building a new chassis to fit inside of the VHC hilts. I also realized it would be fun to try a hand at adding a screen and a crystal like some of the more advanced
sabersmiths out there. With some time and effort I got the hang of fusion360 and what a game changer that is from what I could do before.
I ended up making one for my wife first while I sorted out the neccesary wiring for the Proffie. It was easier to test on hers where we had all the parts from the existing electronics. I think I must have printed about 6 prototypes while trying to find optimal sizing and strength.
It didn’t help that I was having a bear of a time with PETG. I ended up going back to PLA since I had poor settings for layer adhesion.
Once I had the electronics working I shifted back to designing a chassis for the Proffie.
It didn’t take long for the design to shape up. For fun I slapped on some paint to set the color off on the navy filament I chose. I went with gold accents to match the color of the hilt.
I had to move the choke around from where I originally imagined to accomodate the longer length of the chassis but it worked out quite well.
I really appreciated all the community resources out there. Particularly the work done on Proffie. Shout outs to Fredrik Hubinette for ProffieOS, Fett263 for his style libraries, and Ryan Ogurek for ProffieConfig