TOPIC: 12w Red Champ Phoenix

Received my Champion Phoenix today.

The saber is beautiful. It has an amazing feel, great weight and balance. Swings and flourishes feel effortless. The silver paint I'm still not too huge on, I would prefer the look of a normal brushed aluminum finish. They installed a black body a/v switch with a white LED ring as per my request which looks fantastic. Dual tone blade plug (standard issue?), black kill key (I specified) and a silver covertech (standard issue?). 12w Red is my LED w/ Crimson font.

Issue right off the start within 15mins of handling the saber. The black knob/screw will not catch enough threads and seat properly with the blade or blade plug inserted causing the knob/screw to pop out constantly, if you can get it to catch enough for it to stay in place that is. The tolerances in spacing is so close and the threads on the screw are so short that the bore for the knob is possibly 1mm too deep. So with the blade or plug in place the screw bottoms out on it, but not enough threads have been caught to provide a secure fitment. I've come up with a short term solution in switching places with the actual blade retention screw. However now the shroud has the ability to shift and or slide upward (until it catches the new location of the knob). With no blade or plug in, the screw/knob seats perfectly fine. But it will not with the blade or plug in… which is kind of a large deal.

Email has already been sent to SF.

Pictures coming soon.

A couple shots

A couple more

and another

some with fire

thats one fantastic saber man

Looks really good in red! I sent my Phoenix in for a LED repair (turnaround was superfast) and w/o me asking them to they also tweaked something on the shroud that makes it much tighter. I'm sure they'll take care of you too.

.... I'm a little puzzled by some of the pictures. Why are you taking the shroud retention knob off and moving it under the emitter? That knob keeps the shroud in place, I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be moved around.

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I've heard of a few of the Phoenix models having that problem... personally mine did NOT, for which I count myself fortunate, but I have faith they're aware of whatever might be causing the issue by now and get you fixed up. Sorry you ran into that issue tho; that's never fun. Other than that, looks badass. Love it in red!

h2soy wrote:
That is the issue I'm having that I mentioned above.
The retention knob won't stay threaded in place when I have the blade or blade plug installed. I moved it there just to still keep it on the saber. And I put the actual blade retention screw in its place so that I can still install a blade or the plug for the time being.

Also, with me being in Canada.
Shipping time + customs clearance will be roughly a week to send back + the amount of days they keep it for to repair + a week for it be shipped back to me.
Not so quick of a turnaround when it suddenly becomes half the time of the original build within 15mins of possessing it.

Ah, sorry, misunderstood. Sometimes me no read so good. That and I'm operating on less than four hours of sleep right now.... Yaaay pregnant people and their sleeping habits.

Yeah, that shipping time can be absolutely killer. Sorry man. Maybe (I'm not for sure on this, so don't quote me) they have a method they can just walk you through to correct the issue, so you don't have to send it back in. Hopefully something like that will be the case. Always try to stay optimistic, I say. Until it gets annoying. Then go away.

Oh for sure.
They were actually really quick to reply and we're having a dialogue to see if it's something I can fix remotely without having to send it back to add time and cost (which they said they'd reimburse).
I'm usually optimistic, words on a screen carry no tone so it's difficult to tell if I'm angry or not. But I'm truly not angry. Slightly disappointed more than anything, but understanding none-the-less. My posts were just to be concise and to the point but without using emoticons I guess you can't really tell my mood.

I still love the saber and the feel of it though. Luckily I had plans on doing my own modifications to the hilt, so maybe this won't be as large of a deal as it may seem right now. Just need some time to let my creativity and imagination do it's thing. After I give it some fuel of course. So time to cook myself some supper, then get cooked myself afterwards, if ya know what I mean. Hah

I checked with Etsy about mine on this issue, as I swore I've seen another post have some concern about the knob and the blade retention. I was going to see about switching to Exalted which was the original saber I ordered from the main site before switching to Etsy for faster lead time, but the Exalted wasn't on Etsy at the time.

Bright side, they confirmed mine will ship tomorrow. So I'll have some pic's of the Phoenix ala Indigo posted very soon. Hopefully the crew isn't a problem on my order as well.

~ TD

Not even close to full charge.

After I installed sound on my empty Phoenix, I just went ahead and used gorilla glue to mount the shroud permanently to the body. Now I have a different brass greeblie knob decorating the spot where my black shroud retention knob used to go.

Removed knob all together.
perhaps keep this as a window and then drill/tap a new section and install my own screw for shroud retention?

DarthMario95 wrote:
I was actually considering the adhesive and new greeblie method as well.

Did you end up chroming your shroud and pommel like you said you were thinking?
I think theres a good chance my shroud will slide over the av switch. But the killkey port protrudes too far. How would I go about popping it out so that I can remove my shroud and put a different finish on it.

Mine was one of the ones that had the retention knob issue, I posted it in my Phoenix thread. I sent it in last week and they should have gotten it yesterday or today. We will see what they say about it.