I got one of my first crystal candidates in, and test lit it with the green high power LED. It transmits light very well, much better than the tourmaline I had tried earlier. This is a double terminated clear quartz.

Playing around with greebles for the crystal chamber. I love this brass air brake ferrule.

Did a little work on the crystal chamber tonight, the crystal mount anyway... I fashioned this out of a scrap piece of brass, something out of an old dentist's tool I had laying around. Polished the outside, cut a ring for the LED holes and crystal screws, and a groove for floating the positive lead ring.

Right now, it grounds out against the whole unit, but I'll isolate that soon. In the meantime, here she is lit up. VERY bright, very green!

This is the way the leads connect to the positive and negative floating rings behind the crystal mount. There's enough space here to isolate them, and they look nice...

A little more work on the crystal chamber, now I have the correct three way radially symmetrical support rods, instead of the 4 way I had earier. These support rods go through two identical harddrive motor mount housings, and I shaved one down to fit inside the one inch diameter hole in the foreward grip, the other is notched to let the forward grip posts slide through.

I'll be replicating my radiator section from the graflex on this saber, only much smaller.. instead of it being based on 6-32 rods and nuts, it will be based on 4-40.

At this point, I decided to work on the radiator section, recreating that part from my graflex saber in this one, but at a much smaller scale. Previously, I had bolted the brass sheets to a block of wood and cut them down to size on the standup belt sander. This time I wanted an easier way to do it, so I cut, drilled and bolted the one inch square sheets to the top end of my crystal chamber, using the same support rods.

After using the lathe to turn them down to the right size, and dropping off a few that were bent, I was left with 6 or 7 that I liked, and then drilled them out hollow. This was much easier on the lathe than what I did previously.

Deciding to keep five of them, I spaced them out and sanded the sharp edges down on the outside and inside.

After spinning them to get nice radial sanded texture on the faces, I then used the dremel to cut away the section I didn't need, leaving the spot for the wire conduit on one side.

Here it is lit up, you can see the radiator sections below the crystal. I have yet to make the wire conduit section or hide the threaded rods.

I might go back and rewire my LEDs, I have a few revisions I'd like to do...

But I am REALLY starting to like this one.

This is the new LED array, and shaved down crystal mount.

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