Adam Savage Builds His Own Lightsaber!

hey everybody adam savage here in my cave well it's a lovely friday morning in san francisco it also happens to be july 15th which is my uh actual birthday so happy birthday to me happy birthday to you if this is your birthday happy birthday to you in general i have carved today out of the world that's what i think of it when i get a day like today no meetings no phone calls no zooms i have dinner with some good friends tonight quiet dinner that's it it's really nice and uh simple but i it's nine in the morning i'm hoping to spend the next eight hours yeah i'm actually hoping to do this one day build today i wanna make a lightsaber i'm gonna make my own lightsaber it's time for this jedi to make his own lightsaber right right i don't know why i say right i mean it's not like it's a preordained but frankly you know the whole ethos of a jedi should make their own lightsaber yeah i want to make my own lightsaber and the lovely folks at sabreforge have sent over this magnificent lilly unit totally amazing um i'm gonna learn how to use this there's a lot going on in this simple single button uh thing with a uh some lights on the front and some spring pins and a commutator ring into the blade uh looks like it's gonna be incredibly bright i am actually gonna i think try some single point threading in this oh man that coffee is really good i've got some aluminum i got to tell you when oh when i made my first lightsabers in the early 90s i it took me i i remember specifically going down to bay shore medals and looking at their scrap department and finding a piece of uh exactly this which is uh two inch uh 6061 aluminum round finding a piece of this was about 16 inches long they charged me 30 bucks for it they cleaned me out uh and i was like i've got this 30 precious thing and i made my first lightsaber at one of jamie's tool room lathes actually the shenhua he has which is the same model i have over there um the xinhua chieftain 1540 1540 yeah 1540 that's the lathe i was in the middle of replacing the cross slide on my lathe but that's a totally different thing i'm going to put it back together i am going to like i said i think i'm going to do some single point threading so that's where we're going to start because uh i'm gonna start on structure and then i'm going to move towards the aesthetics i'm spooked by this i feel like i feel like part of me wants to prepare myself for like it's not going to be the lightsaber of your dreams it's going to be the first prototype of the lightsaber of your dreams but another part of me really wants the the the magic to happen and that it is the lightsaber of my dreams but you know with a construction like this where it's an object of this kind of importance to me i want it to have a certain kind of [Music] thing to it it's uh yeah i just gotta you know we'll see what happens today we'll see what happens i'm looking forward to it okay um i've even got a little bit of a drawing here i should make some notes for myself uh i have a lot of lightsabers i have a closet back there i have a billy bookcase filled with at least two dozen lightsabers i went through this whole period where if i was on ebay or on the replica prop forum or one of the other forums i frequent and i came across the lightsaber that was like a really good deal like 75 bucks or something i would just grab it and actually a couple of the lightsabers in my cabinet were built by uh ryan nagata in the early in the early days of his prop replication many of them done with hand files yeah that guy his precision is amazing uh anyway uh i've been staring at those lightsabers for weeks kind of looking for inspiration and then i sat down here at the bench with the the unit and i sort of like drew something around it and i feel like i've got something i kind of like [Music] single point thread that's the first part that's where we start ah i'm nervous [Music] oh [Music] [Music] so [Applause] [Applause] so [Music] i'm going with 20 threads per inch and i've got a good yeah i'm happy with it um so it's time to do the other side of the equation but first i want to cut this so i can undo that move that there it is yeah take a look these are nice threads i'll clean all this up later i just want to make sure that i get the other part to fit into that hopefully that was the hard part all right let's see if i can do that that was good so we come out and then we come in okay let's get a little [Music] [Music] now [Music] that is a crunchy ass thread i don't love it i may have to fix that so twenty thousand coming out back [Music] okay so we got 25 so let's see where we're at so far oh now we're not even close no i know i should use the threads but i'm just not going to [Music] oh yeah we're getting close [Music] oh oh we're getting close oh wait a minute oh [Music] so let's undo that get rid of that god i'm sweaty i'm kind of excited hey [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] i successfully have machined a positive and an external and internal thread for what will be the pommel of my lightsaber i have now uh brought the handle to the dimension that i want yeah i cut my thumb it's fine uh now i'm going to knurl the ever living crap out of it i want a big fat diamond pattern for this we're gonna get it um you're gonna want to see this up close and z yeah we're at z yeah it's already as slow as we go now i like the clamp knurler better than any other kind of knurler that's what this is here it clamps from both sides normally knurling involves it normally involves just like pressing a hardened wheel right into the work which puts a lot of stress on that and i don't like to do that so i'm not going to this i mean i can rebuild this at some point it will be better someday oh this is going to take a while while uh while i'm cutting the neural and it seems to be like exactly the big fat diamond girl i was hoping for i'm proceeding on this piece just one step at a time i'm not trying to over when i'm doing something aesthetic like this i have a plan but i also even at any given point in that plan i don't know how much of that plan i am implementing so i always implement the next most obvious thing the mechanical arrangement of the internal and external thread was going to be the thing that like that was going to be the tough part so i wanted that up front then once i uh get it going with uh those two connected then it's time to choose the the grip and how the grip feels once i have that i'm going to start working on this piece i'm going to hollow it out it's going to be part of the speaker resonator chamber i want it to sound neat uh it's going to have a kind of our kind of sound i'm going i give it a kind of an internal volume uh and then uh once i have done that and i think there's going to be some indexing head cutting on that tailpiece the pommel um really the next part is uh holding on to the blade which actually i have a plan for to hold on to it with a very positive grab that won't mark it i don't think it's too much to say that this is uh maybe the best knurl the best knurl i have ever achieved that is what i call [Music] a nice fat diamond pattern yeah i'm really really happy with its consistency and with its feel i'm gonna hit it with a little sandpaper to soften it up but yeah [Music] so what i want is a little bit of a lip captures here yep and if that is 2.3 i think i could make it 2.2 as the depth yep and i get exactly the lip i want 2.2 2.2 2.2 okay so [Music] there we are that's a little lip that i wanted at the bottom of that thing okay let's check this out let's see come on nope can't cross-start that [ __ ] all right let's uh soften that inside edge a little bit so i know i know i know it's not quite looking like a lot right now but it will so so so oh hot i can't get it off i'm gonna have to uh that's gonna be funny all right this is me cutting some fins in here and that's gonna be interesting so this is me at the point in the build when i'm sure it's all going to [ __ ] um i don't know that i love the kind of shape here it's not quite what i was hoping for i may still play around with some of these angles yeah uh whoa also i've got a new interesting problem which is i've screwed these together now i can't get them apart [Music] there it is not bad so i've got this little resonator chamber i've got the back of my saber i'm happy with that i'm i don't know what to do with this thing but i am going to start huh i'm just doing this by eye this is back to all of my early poor habits aesthetic machining all right good about that all right so with that being done oh that's hot all right i cut one more fin down there i may make that angle more extreme but right now i want to cut out uh 16 slots out of here 16 little slots yeah 16 little slots you know what you know what her death i i cut too thin i was worried that i was cut too thin i got impatient uh all right so let's see what i can salvage out of all of this madness [Music] there is no rescue of that part but see how i feel when i put [Music] [Music] why don't i like that shape it's not an interesting shape i'm going to remake that whole tail piece i'm going gonna remake it out of this well yeah it's gonna it's gonna suck up another 90 minutes but yeah i can work this weekend all right so the script basically happened because i was impatient and the scrub happened because i was impatient and i didn't want to drag out that like 50 pound piece of two and a half inch thick aluminum i was like maybe i can make it work with a two inch and the answer is no my drawing i like the proportions of my drawing i should have stuck to it from the beginning and i thought i was making it a little easier i wasn't but i got to try some things out and see how well they worked and i now have a little better of an aesthetic idea and mechanical of how i want this piece to be hopefully this will just be a minor setback [Music] [Music] [Music] ah crap oh that was bad that was bad i didn't always engaged and i picked up my single point internal threader i i don't know if i have one [Music] [ __ ] i've got something frack fracking fracking crack great all right this is rescuable barely [Music] let's see how this [Music] [Music] [Music] i must say i'm very very close and it's quite satisfying to be to find my own machining skills somewhat reliable all right let's go back down so nerve-wracking there are other videos about single point threading and how it works you're better off watching those than trying to glean how to do this for me but all right one thing i found rewarding was there's this whole method of single point threading where you use this counter over here so you can couple your uh cross slide from the main screw and i don't like to uncouple it it's possible to do it but i don't like doing it and i noticed that matthias sorry excuse me uh uh stefan gotzevenger godzilla venter um he specifically doesn't like disengaging i feel vindicated okay it's a testament that is the kind of fit and finish i want i'm very happy okay now i want to not [ __ ] it up note to self order some single point internal threading tools okay in you are in like flynn now [Music] now i'm bringing my drawing in because i like its proportions and i've seen what proportions are like when they're not amazing and i'm unhappy with those so what do we do we only lost an hour for that screw-up well sorry we lost however long it takes what we lost it's fine we're gonna pull a quarter inch off of this the other thing is the overall length which i think is like [Music] [Music] it feels like i'm working really hard to make a flashlight but then lightsabers are essential for that right [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] what so um [Applause] [Laughter] so [Music] [Music] [Music] it's continuing to and tomorrow um [Music] it's not there yet i'm not displeased having had to make that part twice so this is my drawing and i dig my drawing i like i like the layout of this and right now this is overly long that's fine i can machine that down and put the capper on there and all that make that with a set screw ah but somehow i still think i need i still think i see need some refinement in this shape we're close we're close that little shatner there all right i'll see in a minute good morning it's not saturday it's sunday but um i have much more of a point of view on the on the lightsaber the pommel has now reached a fair bit of refinement i'm starting to think of it as the pineapple um it's got a really nice open i've really managed to make it quite open in there while at the same time uh it's got a stop for the speaker of this little unit here which has a tremendous amount of movement capability to it it's really lovely i'm super happy with this savory forge thing um the issue that i have now is that i have to work out a really solid way to hold on to this blade you see the blade has a commutator on it and the there's pins out of the tip of the machine and they have to meet which means i have to lock the blade in but this blade is made of plastic they said make use three set screws which i'm sure is fine but i don't want to do that so i am actually going to build a pressure system for this out of individual leaves at the end of my lifesaver handle and i have set up my late my mill here to achieve such a thing here is the handle here is the blade uh this is just for visual purposes because what i have to do is i have to drive a little pin in here to secure the blade hand the blade handle to this delrin uh hunk that i've got here and that will allow me to hold on to this while spinning and allow me to cut into it without hurting the blade because it's a plastic buck and what i'll end up with is i think a set of um 12 leaves that are going to be this long and the the emitter will actually fit over this and clamp into any given six of them with set screws and that will provide a very gentle like a i'm building a collet i'm building a collet for my lightsaber blade yeah that's how i'm doing it got too hot my aluminum got too hot and it melted the delrin inside the aluminum that's going to be unpleasant it's not unrecoverable it's not unrecoverable but it's going to take a minute [Music] [Music] [Music] it's hammer time rescued rescued rescued from my impatience okay so now we have part the first part the first part this oh it's [Music] it's got a ring there uh so now so now it's time for the emitter [Music] there you go why would you stop there [Music] oh all right we'll go a little deeper [Music] that smell of hot aluminum and machine oil it's like a really good smell uh all right emitter [Music] you've got to be careful about this stuff it looks like tin foil and it will give you the worst paper cuts of your life also it's hot i'm at this interesting stage aesthetically where i can't quite tell what to do with the emitter so i'm gonna cut it off and try it i may have to remake the emitter but the only way i know what shape the emitter has to be is by trying out the one that i've just finished and seeing how i like it it's going to be a few steps everything that i do to achieve this step i am saving time if i have to do it again it's not like i have to do everything from scratch i'm going to make a little uh 1.2 inch uh buck for holding onto this so i could chuck it into my um indexing head we're close we're close to me being able to put this blade in here and try it out and then i'm going to swing it around at home for a day and see how i feel about it and come back in here and maybe put a little more effort in this will benefit a lot from some black paint i also think i still want to chamfer more of these cooling fins here on the pineapple um it really is like one of those it's like a futuristic grenade from demolition man or something all right a candy-colored clown they call the sandman tiptoes to my room every night you are so suave that's not a bad emitter that's doing pretty good we can even do a test fit now [Music] um oh whoops i forgot i won't do this ugh [Music] i am very happy so far so far we are not done [Music] that's great that's beautiful uh all right so yeah still some refinement but for right now i'm very happy all right that was harder to take apart than i intended um i have some work to do i have a bunch of work to do i need to open up the inside of my emitter i'm going to do some aestheticizing in it i've got to clean out excuse me ream out the inside of this lots and lots of little things to get back to where it's easy to assemble easy to disassemble then i have to worry about wiring the switch and then we're it's gonna be like a five-day build some progress has been made i got a haircut some progress has been made uh not a ton um the pineapple continues to get refined i have a thing i think i want to try and do here uh this collet system [Music] it might seem that was on purpose it was not on purpose uh and i had this old uh grafflex two cell body so i pulled out its button and i made a hole here and i think oop i'm gonna attach an og lightsaber button right there uh-huh i gotta figure out how to get it in untrivial uh but i will so what is the next thing the next thing is i'm gonna do uh i think i want my emitter to be a little bit bigger i want to do some detailing in here uh and some detailing here and think about this button i don't know how the hell to attach this just yet the way it's currently going to work is that this guy this guy goes down in here and this button lines up here and then presumably i'd put this in with a little screw or something and a little spacer in between and it would allow me to do all the button commands on the saber forge body ah the body that is my plan my dog maggie has a cough this morning and so she's with me so i did not go to ritual coffee i went to lynnea around the corner from me also a wonderful coffee shop also delicious delicious coffee okay i'm only grabbing on to this with a very gentle touch so i don't mark it too much and that means i have to go very gently in my cuts i went a little vigorously and you saw it jump that's bad [Music] [Music] oh good it doesn't look like i marked up my divots here too much put a little bit of tape there to protect them um and that that's a nice little [Music] i gotta say i'm pleased with that scallop detail i'm gonna clean that up but very gently but it's a nice little isn't it yeah yeah yeah i'm gonna get some black in here and there it is i've made a holder to grip this so i'm going to put a step on this i want to step on it actually yeah i'm going to drill some holes around the perimeter like the end of the ob1 emitter and then i'm going to put a step on this because i'm going to put a little little extra lip on this puppy yeah i'm going to press fit another piece right onto there yeah i gotta tell you one of the things that um goes on a lathe when it's on a on a mill one of the things that goes on a mill when it's old is um well so you can imagine that the uh the link between the table here that moves this way and the upright of the machine that link is this big old set of dovetails that grab each other and hold on really tight but not too tight that you can't move it that's the whole trick in the middle is that it's got to be tight enough so that it doesn't move but loose enough that it moves uh and this is a very very precise relationship using a long tapered bar called a give arm and you can adjust the finesse of that fitment very finely however in a lot of mills you see how the the table is clocked all the way to the right there in a lot of older mills you can't do this because most of the action happens in the middle and as that table goes past it wears down very slowly very slowly very like the stairs at grand central which are like worn after 140 years with just like billions of footsteps you wear it very slowly but the middle of the ways on an old mill become a little sloppy and then as you try and take out that slop you make it tighter at the ends and all this is the longest way of saying my brand new sharp mill brand new it's like two years old which is effectively like to a mill that's like you've just been bottle fed um it's really nice to have a mill that works all the way out to the ends of the waist that's all i told that whole story just so i could say that okay so show you a better view oh who's the pretty boy who's the pretty boy all right so um i'm this is going to be the plate that's the outer side of the emitter and i'm making that first so that i can tune uh the emitter body to receive this because i want it to be a press fit so i'm going to make a hole here that is 1.75 inches that's what i'm talking about this is why i love annular cutters man dial that in and get your deal okay here we go i'm going to take off 200 valve so the inside of this is precisely 1.75 inches in internal dimension so i'm going to chuck this into the lathe and cut a step here that is 1.7500 [Music] one point five inches in diameter i'm gonna make this a one thousandth press fit so that that sits on top of that i've made my step here and it is literally two thousandths over the internal diameter of this i'm gonna heat up this ring and get it on there and once it cools down it should be the the two should never be parted or torn aside [Music] [Music] [Music] so i'm happy i'm happy [Music] [Music] [Laughter] i got the shortest lightsaber in all of christendom yeah the emitter is that a place i'm pretty happy the pommel isn't a place i'm pretty happy what is left ah [Music] the handle oh this button this button issue crap i'm gonna have to think about this but i'm really close this is the handle and i'm really happy with how it's working so let's um let's do a test fit again these are 8 32 set screws pressured against a kind of a internal collet i've placed at the emitter that should hold on to this plastic blade with a lot of force a lot of gription i've got a lot of surface area [Music] instead of just uh little set screws all right and my set screw is pressing into that leaf right there and so that leaf is grabbing this thing on a much more um much more positive basis yes all right i feel like weirdly [Music] yeah as i'm looking at it in reflection i kind of like it the sound is great and the light is beautiful i really like my emitter i love how close this whole thing is to the drawing i mean i know i've made it longer and i may look i started out i started out making it long i wanted to be able to make it shorter you can't make it longer but you can't make it shorter so i'm trying that out i like the way this looks down here i think that's a neat kind of like okay i also like that i can get both hands on this it's got a it's got a center of gravity center of balance right about there this button all right so look i've taken a luxury approach to this i had this old two-cell graflex um since this is threaded and i like its threading i'm going to use that hole and this tab bent down to actually attach this threaded switch right into the handle of my saber and that should be the finish of this thing i'm going to take this apart and save all the little bits and pieces because they're useful [Music] yeah i know i'm beating everything up all [Music] [Applause] [Music] right yep [Music] i'm very happy right a little teflon plug that little nubbins for pushing the switch and this one now let's see yeah see that sits right in there [Music] [Applause] always always that happens [Music] all right [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] oh dude notice [Music] yeah my little dial here my little thing i don't even know where that came from i don't even know what that's from but i had it upstairs and i drilled a hole a little small for its threads and i pressed it in and it's a great addition i've got the original graflex i've got the original graflex red button there i'm really digging how this all looks [Music] ladies and gentlemen the savage lightsaber yeah it's real it's done i for one being savage could not be more pleased i i thought i was coming in today to clean up the unholy mess i left i brought the saber home i looked at it i'm really happy with it i could not be more happy with it of course i see a couple of things i want to do i could add a couple little brass rods over here i think that the handle has exceeded all of my expectations for simplicity it feels like a piece of royal hardware i think i might want to do an acid etch of a jedi glyph right here i think that's what this requires i think that'll make it feel like a piece of real jewelry yeah so brass rods the brass rods and then i'll figure out how i want to cut a jedi [Music] [Music] so i did a uh i did i carved a little glyph the glyph i carved was from a jedi temple and it stands for the rune death but the force and it is actually um a runic symbol i guess of the letter f within the jedi alphabet which stands for the force i thought that was the right kind of thing now this is funny because let's just see how this thing feels i i spent a lot of time sort of just you know staring at the saber and pondering it's awesome see i think this is a really great that's great i really like the way the symbol looks can you see it come on there you go not nice so that was just a um i carved the roon out of uh some vinyl heat shrink tape it acts as a fine resist um the carving of the rune makes it look kind of rough and ready and there's a thing about acid etching uh which is like in ye oldie pieces like when you go to the victorian albert museum and you see hand-built bits of armor it looks a lot more like this than it does like um a really nice cricket vinyl cut uh it's rough and ready around the edges uh so i wanted the same feeling so i i cut the roon i drew the rune in the marker i cut it out of the heat shrink tape which is basically just a vinyl i mean electrical tape would work as well um i then uh made a little bowl around it and this is why i like this stuff because i can see through it and if i was getting any leakage i'd be able to see it i've had ferric ferric chloride was the etchant i used that's the uh wetta workshop favorite uh aluminum etchant and i just did like eight and a half minutes on that rune and then i hit it on the polisher and uh i feel like it's great i'm really i'm pretty happy with it i'm pretty happy with that we're not going to put the electronics in this time we're just going to put the button in and then we're just gonna we're gonna ponder it for a while that's how this works i like to think of this as a castle as a castle stacked on a pineapple that's kind of how i think about these two parts this is the castle turret i'm really happy so i'm using four 832 screws to hold in the leaves of my collet uh saber blade grabber uh what's nice is i can just stick a piece of one inch delrin in there and the whole thing stays together i've got these two brass horns i put in there i i can't remember what these are from i i literally can't remember what these are from i have like four of them i can't remember okay yeah we're not done yet we're not done yet so i had this idea over the weekend that the the bottom of this should have a crystal sticking out of it something like this uh as far as that's just a piece of some colored resin i had around and i threw onto the belt sander it's terrible it doesn't work i am going to make a piece i'm going to cast a little uh epoxy jewel out of this stuff uh i find it makes a very nice clear casting and it does it pretty quickly uh but first i'm gonna make a mounting point in here uh and that requires me to put this back into the lathe and add a couple of screws to hold on to that mounting point and it's going to be a very well i don't want to inhibit the sound too much so it's going to be a very low profile little mount uh i know i probably should light it but i i don't know how i can get like a light small enough in there and i can't necessarily route one back from up front not now at least anyway maybe later sabreforge could give me one with a nice wire coming out the bottom but until that day until that day uh we're gonna do a little bit more work on the saber cause i can't stop mucking with this thing because i'm very happy with it so this mounting point in here is gonna be an interesting little piece um there's a ledge there you go see the ledge there so what i'm gonna do is the saber has a front in the back that's the front with a little glyph a little glyph there there you go um and then that's the back and on the back i'm going to have two little button heads or flat heads or some sort of screw what i've got to do is i've got to make a little chunky chunk of aluminum that fits on that ledge and like if the ledge is like this i need to make a piece of aluminum that fits in there and then once i get it to fit in there i will drill two holes that are perfectly centered on the back then i will put the piece in there mark it tap those once i can tap into those and hold on to that piece so it's being held both in the angle and by two screws then i chuck this in the lathe and i drill a center hole in my holder yeah that that took me a little while on the plane to think about coming home from las vegas i've cut this little piece of rind shape to a rough approximation of the angle now i'm just going to try and get close that is not bad it needs to be a little taller i think that is a reasonable angle i can come in and i can i can work with that i'm getting ahead of myself though i want to cast up the so i've got a little chunk of aluminum that matches my chunk of rent shape but before i continue on that i want to cast up my blank for my jewel we'll use a little bit of uh pvc pipe not much one of the nice things about casting up a blank in a uh in pvc pipe is pvc pipe is extruded so it's perfectly parallel it means that your piece will come out and that's nice nice that's nice i've got some good uh urethane tints here that i like are the mix all brand and i really i'm gonna be flying by the seat of my pants for the color of this jewel violet ocean blue blue uh so we're gonna try a little bit of uh ocean blue regular blue and violet uh i like how this stuff remains quite transparent as a as a color that's the violet oh that's going to be too much already um ocean blue ooh ah it's gonna be way too much all right i think it was overly ambitious we'll try we'll mix this up and we'll see what we get you can't mix too much with this stuff got a little extra i'm gonna i'm gonna just pour it in the silicone mold why waste casting material maybe this will be useful to me someday oh i still got a little bit more eh all right all right awesome three separate things all right we'll set those aside let them set let them think about what they did time to get this guy going drill holes first drill holes first i've marked i've measured opposite the glyph to the other side i've marked out my two holes i frankly i don't feel like i have to be crazy exactly if i wanted these to be exact i'd put them into the mill and i'd you know line everything up and spin at 180 but frankly it doesn't need to be that that tight but do you think button heads are the proper the proper unit no 632s and any stainless i mean i guess i could polish these i will do a polish on the back of those yeah yeah yeah yeah i'll do a polish once they're in place [Music] always get one extra screw in an operation like this where i am drilling through a surface to tap into another thing i.e the outer shell of this to tap into this i start all the holes with the tap size later i'll open these up to be able to let the bolts slide through but for alignment you start with the tap drill only not the through drill i use these makita 12 volts when i want some sensitivity to my drilling uh they just give me a little more precision and a little better of a hand feel [Music] now when i want to transfer i want to stick this in here and mark where these holes are going to go yeah that's the tricky one let's sand that smooth so rounded it a bit so i have a nice marking surface and give it a center line and then [Music] you need something oh it's hard to manipulate around in there isn't it yep cow getting there come on come on geez oh there we go all right if you can see there i maybe you can't see i can try and help you see my center line there we go it lines up with those and now i've got to mark it oh my gosh this is going to be crazy all right let's see if that did something no all right it sounded like one of my taps broke and the tap looked broken but there's no broken piece here which is confusing but i've got two tapped holes i received these screws just fine the biggest mechanical load this thing's going to undergo frankly is my lathing to the center of it could go a little bit deeper [Music] we're going to do a little lathe work before we get go back to this all right i've hogged a little bit out in there it wasn't pretty i didn't film it sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry it's like building a ship in a bottle that's something i haven't done okay i gotta get to the other side [Music] okay [Music] what we're gonna do is we're gonna we're gonna get the bottom one done and then we're gonna do the top one afterwards i was way ambitious trying to do both at once oh that's what happened huh [Music] drilling an off-angle hole well it's square to that surface but not to that one when it burst through there it burst through and snapped the tip off the drill bit i can only assume that the same thing happened to the tap on the last run uh i have repositioned and opened up the shaping here so i have more room to move so hopefully that won't be as much of an issue here nope you are intact okay so nice nice oh god that's great feels great nice amount of purchase oh could you oh nice all right let's see if i got it right hmm that seems about right all right happy happy happy happy enjoyed so here's how we're going to do this we're going to make the whole center using the through bit great [Music] that was the thing now i have on the opposite of the front two screws holding in a nice big chunk of aluminium uh now i'm gonna drill a center hole in that and then i'm gonna cut away everything i don't need besides that center hole everything [Music] i never don't find screwing these together super satisfying [Music] lathe to the lathe boy wonder all right so now i have the holes for the screws i've got the center hole for the jewel now i'm going to cut away a whole bunch of this crap so that i can actually make sure the sound is actually bouncing outwards and all of that stuff all right i've taken everything away that i don't need and i did it off camera because i was like bouncing back and forth between five machines okay three machines there's what i've ended up with oh it's a pretty little thing isn't it yeah designed it backwards i did that is a 1024 uh hole which is great i don't believe that time could change your mind that's the front oh that's the mag nice nice my little mount for a gem is there i'm very pleased i'm really happy with how that went i think it actually looks great i even like the look of the screws on the back but i won't get to the jewel until tomorrow however i did think that i wanted to do some uh some bluing here some specific bluing i'm gonna do just this middle section here as if it's heat burnt from the bottom yeah i'm just gonna try that and see how that looks [Music] i want to seal that with a little bit of all clad 2. the clear acrylic tends to put a little bit of a matte cast on it so the clear coat tends to make it look more realistic [Music] yeah okay right there's that business we're going to take care of that [Music] yeah yeah that [Music] yeah i'm i'm i'm pleased with that it's kind of neat i mean if i end up not liking it i can pull it off but [Music] yeah we'll see we'll see [Music] come on set i want it to set i don't love this blue it's not the right color blue i'm going to pull a lot of it off we'll see how it goes oh oops sorry [Music] yeah i mean for many of my favorite paint jobs or paint jobs in which i was pulling off the old paint job the thing that didn't work the good news is my uh my resin has set so here i said it would be easy to get out let's see if i was totally wrong are you really not budging i've always had resin just pop right out of this stuff boop that's what i'm talking about okay first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to tap the end of this and give it a little 10 24 i think it's 10 24 i'm just going to make sure that 10 24 hole and then make a little 10 24 bolt so this can screw into there that'll be the first part i'm just installing a screw from the back so that it sticks out yeah there we go nice nice nice all right so shhh [Music] not bad [Music] and you can see a little bit better of the blue here they yeah i know it would be better if it was lit and i'm not really sure how to get it lit but you know we will see yeah it's quite nice yeah all right so yeah the lightsaber is literally four parts i love that that one rings uh so let's put the core back in the core is exactly one inch so i was able to bore this out this is maybe my favorite feature is the old graflex button on this it just so ties everything together i have this feeling about lightsabers in general is that um i find sometimes that they look awesome they look too new to me so i wanted to build something that um was uh what do you call it suitably uh old looking and sort of luxurious set screws into the into the tines and it holds it really nice this is my first foray into this whole zone the amount of variability that saberbait puts into this is astounding to me and that i mean i'm still learning all the single button controls because it's sort of like using one of those old yamaha dx7 menus from the 1980s however i really appreciate the amount of customization that is possible with this their loudspeaker works so beautifully with my resonating chamber and i added the blue stone it's not like a kyber crystal exactly but i just knew that i wanted some sort of blue jewel there let's get out there and defeat the empire [Music] ah [Music] you'll edit this to make me look cool right i really want to thank uh justin and shane from sabre bay for providing the electronics core and the neopixel blade from kr sabres they are selling this sabre cord now at sabrebay.com the speaker is great it works beautifully with my resonator it's one touch operation oh dude i just can't ten-year-old me is in here and i he cannot believe that this is what is that that's even cooler thank you so much for watching if you'd like to support us even further you can by becoming a tested member details are of course below but it includes all sorts of perks and we're building them all the time you get advanced word and behind the scenes photos of some of our projects questions you get to ask direct questions during my live streams and we have some members only videos including the adam real time series of unbroken unedited shots of me working here in the shop they are weirdly meditative thank you guys so much i'll see you on the next one

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 5,246,254

Keywords: tested, lightsaber, adam savage lightsaber, adam savage lightsaber build, adam savage star wars lightsaber, adam savage own lightsaber, tested adam savage, tested one day builds, adam savage one day build star wars, adam savage one day build, adam savage one day build lightsaber, lightsaber diy tutorial, adam savage star wars, how to build a lightsaber, lightsaber build, real life lightsaber, saberbay, neopixel lightsaber, neopixel saber, neopixel, how to make a lightsaber

Id: axiYo61XRRw

Length: 85min 39sec (5139 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 07 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/strongo]

There’s something he captures, similar to bob ross… it’s not even about the end result it’s about watching the process.

[u/17934658793495046509]

He should have threaded the inside of the bottom of the hilt, so he could fabricate a crystal mount that screwed in to it, then the egg could screw down over it. Would have been really satisfying. The finished product looked amazing, made me want to take on my own saber.

edit: drew a doodle

[u/Aeri73]

love how he turns five while testing it at the end :-)

[u/gkzia]

Ofcourse he did. Mad lad.

[u/casualphilosopher1]

Where did he get the crystals?

[u/[deleted]]

"This is my first foray into this whole zone"

Of course it is :P