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TOPIC: Revan hilt (PIC UPDATE) - Fractures and gold inlay

Revan hilt WIP - Fractures, copper or gold inlay 4 months 3 weeks ago #68649

  • Jas-Ot
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Don't know if you have used this particular chassis, but there is a VERY small channel along each side just under the board right above the battery which you can feed some wires through. I moved a couple of the larger wires form the top of the board to attach underneath (at the back) and routed them though the channel. That should allow the chassis to spin more freely in the body.

I'll be interested in checking that board out. There is definitely price/feature gap in boards, you've got the DIY Hasbro board at around $20-22 bucks, and then you jump up to basically $70 for NBv3 or Sabercore board. With the Spark2 at $80 and more feature rich, it seem like there should be a $40-50 board in there that is more on par with the Sabercore or NB boards.
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Revan hilt WIP - Fractures, copper or gold inlay 4 months 3 weeks ago #68651

  • Kouri
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Rewiring ForceFX/BlackSeries boards for FoC is on my experimental to-do list. An NPN transistor on the clash sensor should just about do it, but you're still limited to ~3W of power with the built-in LED driver. Thought maybe a PNP transistor on the LED lines might be enough to get full brightness out of an RGB LED, but haven't given it a try yet.
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Revan hilt WIP - Fractures, copper or gold inlay 4 months 3 weeks ago #68653

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Kouri wrote:
Rewiring ForceFX/BlackSeries boards for FoC is on my experimental to-do list. An NPN transistor on the clash sensor should just about do it, but you're still limited to ~3W of power with the built-in LED driver. Thought maybe a PNP transistor on the LED lines might be enough to get full brightness out of an RGB LED, but haven't given it a try yet.

Let me know if and when you figure that one out, I'll be interested in trying the same thing down the road.

So, update:

Rewired much of the board, wiring is a nasty mess of heat shrink at this point, but it's working. Not the prettiest soldering/wiring job I've ever done, but it works.

I had to ditch the speaker mount to get everything to fit in the body, but everything finally fits.

On a SAD note, the hilt took a little tumble off the desk while trying to get at a hard to reach spot for rewiring and the gold leaf around the emitter got damaged. Not a huge deal, I just need to reapply the leaf to the one spot, but still a bit sad. :( :angry:

been playing with the blade color settings and trying to dial in the right color/effect. I'll try and get some pictures up of Red, Green, and the main red -> orange blade.
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Revan hilt WIP - Fractures, copper or gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68654

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Ok, just some minor cleanup on the saber after it took a "spill" off the desk to be done. Very minor blemishes on the gold leaf, easy fix.

BUT, now for the first of the money shots...





Main font is the "Dark Apprentice" font - Kylo Ren inspired - Blade is a blood orange with a little flicker into a yellow orange with different shades of yellow for FOC, Lockup and Blaster block

Font 2 is the "Essence Font" - Green blade, slight pulse with a tint of yellow, yellow/orange FOC, Lockup and Blaster blocks

Font three is a Vader font - Red static blade with yellow FOC, Lockup and Blaster Block

Side note, I may have an "Iffy" recharge port :(
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Revan hilt (Finished) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68677

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I'm calling this one finished. Some minor touch up work to be done, but generally speaking the hilt is done.

It has both been fun, and a challenging learning experience. I learned some lessons along the way which I think will serve me well on some future builds. I of course couldn't just start out simple with my first full build!

Some general notes:

ASP Fallen Hilt:
Great hilt, feels awesome in hand, spins wonderfully, and is well machined. The emitter section is long, and the body section is short, something to keep in mind for anyone wanting to do a build using the hilt (this will be true of any Revan hilt I think). The body section is just about big enough for the length of the 18650 battery and the speaker, leaving about 1/8 of an inch of room. CRAM-FU all the way. There is additional space up in the emitter though which could be used to hold some of the wiring (especially anything where you might be splicing wires together on the LED, switches or recharge port). With the Spark2 I would suggest detaching the TruDrive and soldering the LED leads to it so that it sits up in the emitter, and then run a braided strand of the wires down to the board. It would make for more room and an easier wiring job. I did it the hard way....

SF Quad LED
No complaints here. the LED star was well made and mated to the heatsink without issue. SF was able to get the custom LED made quickly, only took a couple days. Very pleased here

SF Heatsink
Overall I like the heatsink, it mates easily with the quad stars and was very easy to wire the LED with. However, the all black powder coating leaves a bad taste in my mouth due to the non reflective nature of it. The inside of the heatsink isn't going to reflect any lost light back into the lens. Even though the lens is focusing the light (NOTE: A collimating lens is supposed to NOT require any reflector) there is still going to be some level of light loss out the sides of the lens. I solved this problem by coating the lens in reflective material so there is zero loss of light. It did make a difference. After coating the lens, side by side 2 LEDs in this hilt were just about on par in brightness with all 4 LEDs in another saber in my non scientific eyeball test. Which at least in IMO seems to suggest that the TIR optic has SOME light loss, either that or I'm crazy.

Segmented Switch
LOVE the looks of this. Much cooler looking than the ring or dot switches. ZERO complaints.

SF Recharge port
Meh? This RP 'sticks' when I insert the kill key or charger. It's not as smooth as my other ones. I had a couple occasions where removing the kill key did not power up the saber. reseating the kill key and removing again eventually powered up the saber. This has only happened a few times but still leaves bad taste in my mouth.

Spark2
I cannot say enough good things about this board. I'm REALLY impressed with the feature set and motion capabilities with this board for only $80. Scott (Naigon) was awesome and did a one off order for me since he was out of stock. Unless a space or budget constraint is in play, I'll be using NEC boards in my builds. Awesome communication and service from Scott, and an awesome board.

Goth Chassis
Hit and miss on this, but that's because of my build and not the product itself. I think the chassis overall is very good. I would make some design changes to it to allow for easier access to wiring along the bottom of the board along the sides. I would consider using the chassis or a variation of it again, depending on the build.

Weathering the hilt
Pretty well documented in the build thread but some quick notes: Depending on the depth and degree of scarring, you may go through a couple diamond tipped dremmel tools. It wore one out almost completely and the second one is probably around 50%. Metalic iron base then with a spray of metallic copper over it, and the usual paint thinner and a towel rubbing of the hilt produces a nice organic looking "grime" and fills the cracks in the hilt in with an old oxidized looking copper.

Metal Leaf Gilding
On the surface it seems easy, in reality, not so much, especially when trying to achieve some level of texture and distress. As an inlay into the scars it's phenomenal when paired with the iron+copper weathering. It may be hard to see in some of my pictures but in person it's quite a stunning effect. I learned A LOT just doing the tiny bit of gilding on this hilt. My next build may make very extensive use of gilding.

Added pics and video to first post., but just in case, here's the video of the saber in action:
Last Edit: 4 months 2 weeks ago by Jas-Ot.
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Revan hilt (Finished) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68725

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Jas-Ot wrote:
I solved this problem by coating the lens in reflective material so there is zero loss of light. It did make a difference. After coating the lens, side by side 2 LEDs in this hilt were just about on par in brightness with all 4 LEDs in another saber in my non scientific eyeball test. Which at least in IMO seems to suggest that the TIR optic has SOME light loss, either that or I'm crazy.

2005 MR Vader
B/B/W Graflex 2.0
yellow SF ASP Interceptor
Last Edit: 4 months 2 weeks ago by Jaden Korr.
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Revan hilt (Finished) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68729

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I used an aluminum based highly reflective "duct tape". I'm not sure the brand, I think it may be actual "duck tape" brand. It's the metallic tape, it is basically ultra thin sheets of some kind of alloy that has an adhesive on one side. It's VERY shiny and reflective. There are multiple kind of tape that are somewhat similar, but this particular kind was the easiest to work with and was reflective on the adhesive side as well.

Not 100% sure
but I think this is it:



I cut it into very small triangular shapes and placed them around the lens, took around 20+ little pieces to cover it. Pain-staking process since the cut pieces are so small and a real pain to line up correctly. In hind sight I wish I would have taken a pic of the optic.

I'm going to be doing another build in the next month or so and will use the same technique, I'll make sure to take some pics.
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Revan hilt (PIC UPDATE) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68730

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BLOOD ORANGE FONT PICS:













The red pops out more in pictures than to the naked eye on the font. In person this font is a dark orange, with pulses/flickers that add a lighter orange to it.
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Revan hilt (PIC UPDATE) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68731

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GREEN FONT PICS:









I was a little surprised how good the green looks on this hilt.
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Revan hilt (PIC UPDATE) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68732

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RED MIX (Medium RED?) PICS:







This is just a straight mix between the Red and Photo Red LEDs, which I think is what SF would call Medium Red? It looks FANTASTIC in person and I find myself struggling between the Blood Orange damaged crystal style font and this straight red one for which I like better.
Last Edit: 4 months 2 weeks ago by Jas-Ot.
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Revan hilt (Finished) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68772

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Jas-Ot wrote:
I used an aluminum based highly reflective "duct tape". I'm not sure the brand, I think it may be actual "duck tape" brand. It's the metallic tape, it is basically ultra thin sheets of some kind of alloy that has an adhesive on one side.

Thanks; I'll look for that the next time I'm at the hardware store. Anything to make a brighter saber! I'm also going to swap my ASP heatsink for a regular SF one (to prevent the lens from being misaligned since I'm not threading the top into a thin neck)
2005 MR Vader
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Revan hilt (PIC UPDATE) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68775

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just an FYI on why I coated the lens, VS say just coating the inside of the HS:

So, TIR optics work by using the boundary layer refraction property of light when it hits a boundary between two different mediums with different reflective properties at specific angels. Light will reflect internally through the medium. There's a whole series of formulas around this. Anyway, in simplest terms, boundary layers can act like a mirror in certain instances.

There can still be light loss however as the light may still exit the medium through a different angle. That and the lens material may absorb some of the light itself.

So, in this case I opted to coat the boundary layer so that any potential light loss would be reflected back into the lens directly across the boundary layer. Coating the inside of the HS could potentially still incur some light loss as the light might not all be directed back into the lens. It's pretty nitpicky, we'd be talking some pretty small orders of magnitude, but in the case of bright sabers, every little bit helps right?
Last Edit: 4 months 2 weeks ago by Jas-Ot.
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Revan hilt (PIC UPDATE) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68776

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Jas-Ot wrote:
just an FYI on why I coated the lens, VS say just coating the inside of the HS:

So, TIR optics work by using the boundary layer refraction property of light when it hits a boundary between two different mediums with different reflective properties at specific angels. Light will reflect internally through the medium. There's a whole series of formulas around this. Anyway, in simplest terms, boundary layers can act like a mirror in certain instances.

There can still be light loss however as the light may still exit the medium through a different angle. That and the lens material may absorb some of the light itself.

So, in this case I opted to coat the boundary layer so that any potential light loss would be reflected back into the lens directly across the boundary layer. Coating the inside of the HS could potentially still incur some light loss as the light might not all be directed back into the lens. It's pretty nitpicky, we'd be talking some pretty small orders of magnitude, but in the case of bright sabers, every little bit helps right?

Do you thing this effect could be achieved using a reflective/metallic paint on the lens rather than duct tape? If so I could give that a shot this weekend.
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Revan hilt (PIC UPDATE) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68777

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It might, but it also might "damage" the lens. I'm not sure what solvents may be in the paints and if the paints were to cause any level of pitting or scarring it would effect the TIR properties of the lens.

I would recommend a separate reflective medium on the lens rather than paint.
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Revan hilt (PIC UPDATE) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68779

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Going to start a different thread for this discussion.
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Revan hilt (PIC UPDATE) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68947

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This saber is so beautiful. Thanks for the update!


- RGBA+ Monarch, FW Epoch, Juggernaut, Exhalted
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Revan hilt (PIC UPDATE) - Fractures and gold inlay 4 months 2 weeks ago #68948

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Thanks for the praise!

I'm considering making another one nearly identical for sale. I have a couple other hilts I'd like to get built too though.
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