TOPIC: Z-Saber Scratch Build

About to visit family and had promised the littlest one a Vader hilt - but she's got siblings, so that means everyone needs to be armed. Brothers are big into Mega Man, so whipped up a couple of beam sabers. I'll be writing up the Z-Saber construction.

As usual with my budget builds, everything starts with a shop drawiing to figure out what lengths of pipe I'll need and dimensions of machined/printed parts.



With the Z-Saber a very short one-handed hilt, this build would be tight. I didn't want to use a smaller battery because:

1) It wouldn't be fair for one saber to die much earlier than the rest

2) I didn't want to mix chargers - the other two hilts are using 1000mA chargers, which would be a bit much for a 14500 cell - and I don't trust the kids to not mix up their chargers.

Thankfully, there was *just* enough space for all the electronics, so long as I went with a smaller speaker and a pommel-mounted charge port - which meant designing a custom pommel.






4" length of 1" thinwall polycarbonate tubing for the chassis, 20mm speaker leaves room for charge wires, 1" x 1" rebuilt BladeBuilder board, 18650 battery, with switch and LED wires running out the front. Chassis secures to the pommel, and the whole assembly slides into the hilt to be secured with screws and/or glue. I'd wind up re-using the design (with alternate pommels) for the Sigma beam sword and Vader lightsaber since Vader wound up with a similiar space limitation, and there wasn't time to design a new setup for Sigma.



Not quite the quality I'd want in my portfolio, but the kids should have fun:



And a group shot of all the in-progress hilts:

That's so cool Kouri, what an awesome thing to do for the kids! If someone had given me something like that when I was young I'd have pooped myself

And the battles would have been epic...

Dude, that's cool. As a Mega Man nerd myself and a fan of SF, it's cool to see a Z Saber made from lightsaber parts and custom made parts together. Also really cool for you to do that for the kids. I'm sure they'll lose their minds over them, haha.

So awesome man.

Inspiring too.

Thanks guys~

Moved the shop drawing to an external host since the SFF re-sizing erased a bit of detail.

Also tinkered last night before packing these up. Realized the sound vents were too small and muffing the already-quiet 20mm speakers, so I went about re-drilling the holes wider.

Sigma and Vader turned out fine.

Zero, on the other hand...



So needed an emergency speaker replacement. Turns out super glue does an excellent job of bonding PETG to Polycarbonate, so there was no removing the pommel to access the speaker. Wound up cutting a new spot in the polycarb chassis, underneath the soundboard, to pull out the original speaker and mount a replacement.



Works pretty well, actually, and thinking I might refine the setup for future builds, since it leaves me extra space to tuck away wires.