Life-sized Star Wars replica props, it’s one way to keep the ladies away. But if you’re going to make them, you should do it right. [Bradley W. Lewis] spent some serious time getting this [Obi-Wan Kenobi] lightsaber right. The seven-page build log provides plenty of eye-candy. We especially enjoyed the machine and coloring of he grenade-fin portion. The LED ladder that lights the blade is also quite interesting. For the icing on the cake he incorporated a high-performance speaker connected to the sound board from a Hasbro Force FX which provides that classic swashbuckling sound from a galaxy far, far away.
Devote Your Life To Replicating A Lightsaber
It takes an extreme geek to machine his own parts and build this (or a jedi). Love it.
He has another lightsaber build going on right now on SomethingAwful.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3330639
His ANH Graflex was even better… join us at TCCSS ;) Link is http://www.slothfurnace.com/sabers/ANHLuke_01.html
Needs more blue laser.
Light sabers are not toys! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CspZjHBt_TI
Very nice build. There is a company in Texas that makes replicas, always wanted to get one.
http://parksabers.com/
You can build the hilt for Obi Wan lightsaber for like 30 bucks in plumbing. In fact, most of the lightsabers costed about 30 bucks to make. A lot of them were made out of the tube part of old flash guns and bits of windshield wiper blades. However, the Obi Wan one is really the only one you can build afforadably anymore since after everyone found out about the lightsabers being made out of old camera flash guns, the price on flash guns skyrocketed.
I have been thinking about the 1W blue lasers and a light-saber combination. place a rectactable FM antenna in the center with a slightly concave mirror on top. shooting the laser at an offset angle from the base to hit the mirror could have the laser wrap all the way around the antenna if the angles were proper. This would be as close to a working light-saber as you could get with today’s tech… put a motorized antenna on it, and it would even extend retract w/ the push of a button.
OMG。。。
No, Shadar, repeat after me: “His ANH Graflex sux. Converting Graflex flash units into movie props makes Joe Rosenthal spin in his grave.”
But, I guess I shouldn’t care. I already found a complete Speed Graphic kit that was passed on to that great eBay in the sky *with* the flash.
@SteveO, exactly what I was thinking!
You could then flip a switch, have the “beam”
emerge from the device, and it would actually
be somewhat faitful to the concept.
However unless you’re running megawatt power
levels, you won’t be amputating limbs of rowdy
bar patrons pulling out a blaster on you.
From a proof of concept standpoint, I think
it would be a reasonable prototype. But the
core technology to capture the energy level
required to deploy such a device as a usable
weapon systems platform currently doesn’t
exist (or maybe it does in some classified
DARPA lab).
The beam would have to sufficient energy
density to cut thru material, without hitting
the core extension rod. In the Star Wars
realm, we all ASSumed, that it was a pure
light beam. My conjecture is, a metallic
center piece must exist to contain the beam
in some way.
Also, you’d need a sufficiently small power
source with huge energy storage capacity.
Eh, gonna need a lot of “convergence” of
different technologies to bring it to reality.
Like Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings being ahead
of their time (except the core technologies
did not exist back in his time).
Wonder if Lucas Film will be suing the
developers – in perpetuity….
Probably the most accurate way to recreate a working light saber would be an array of lasers around the base with fast adjusting focalpoints, that using mirrors (Like in barcode scanners scan the lasers up and down so that the different focalpoints overlap and turn the air into plasma.
You might be able to do it with one laser in the blade.
Now we just have to make lasers capable of outputting a joule of energy constantly without melting that you can hold in one hand, and a power source small enough to carry in said hand.
Mega incredible.
I’m absolutely floored.
Beautiful work, and a fitting tribute.
Wow, thanks everyone! I am so glad you liked the builds!
Liked? LIKED?
understatement
This guy doesn’t know how to wire LEDs.
Nice futuristic ideas about a laser beam at the handle, but i always thought of it as some confined plasma… If I were to imagine something, I would say there’s a metal rod in the middles magnetically confining the plasma, which is excited by an RF generator at the handle. If you wanna shoot far, think of a small fusion reactor in your hands, that would give you the required self sustaining temperature :)
very nice only problem I have with it is, it’s so bright it hurts to look at it I’m a bit photosensitive.
What a incredible set of skills… to waste on something this mundane.
Star wars is just a sci-fi fairy tale rip-off. I is stupid and had no place in geek culture. (nurd culture perhaps).
The potential lost here.. wheep.
Phreakin’, PHREAKIN awesome!
So much detail.
A lightsaber (in the films) is obviously controlling plasma with high-frequency magnetic fluctuations, not a physical mirror. There need be no center rod, the frequency modulation controls the intensity and color of the ‘beam’.
Basically a VanDerGraff Generator on steroids. Generator wold be spinning in the base, focused out to a specific length. This gyroscopic effect would explain why the weightless blades act as if they had real heft to them, and also produce the accompanying Doppler Effect noises.
How I always imagined it anyway.