The New Hope Luke Skywalker Graflex Lightsaber
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This evening, I shortened up my end screws, wired a preliminary LED into the crystal, and set my batteries and a temp switch in the battery canister.

Another shot, I love the color contrast between the blue of the light and the gold/yellow of the brass.

All spread out, I may mount it this way. I'll have to build a mount.

This is a quick sketch of how I think it will all go together. This design will evolve I am sure, but this is a nice roadmap.

I found some "super bright" rectangular LEDs at radio shack, and whittled them down almost to the diode.

You can see the small rubber o ring I have tossed on there to keep them together while I test for lighting. It's MUCH brighter than what I had.
However, these pictures do NO justice to how BLUE these LEDs are, they look cyan in the photos, but it's a beautiful deep blue in person.

So I set aside the first mounting ring I made and machined one that accepts my LEDs and O ring in vertical slots for the LEDs, and a ring inset for the O ring.

Here you can see the way it goes together. It's MUCH cleaner, cooler, and brighter than what I had before. I will solder the ground leads from the LEDs to the brass, and use the positive leads to form a concentric ring around the whole setup, and solder a solid wire to that, and lead off to the battery pack.

And now, today, I soldered on the wire mounts for the prongs, and set it in the chassis, to test fit. The crystal is NICE and snug in there now, both being held in by the prongs and the LEDs

Next, I will have to trim a bit out of my radiator for this to fit snug, and maybe shorten the radiator by a section or two.

So now I have my battery pack and sounboard installed, I need to pass the wires almost from the back of the chassis to the front.
Mostly this is easily done, but where I have my radiator and crystal section, I'd rather not have exposed wiring, so I went to work today making a brass wire conduit to replace one of my threaded rods.
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