May the Fourth Be With You!

It's that time of year again! Time for me to make my one Facebook post a year so the people I went to high school with know I'm still kicking. Every year since 2015 I have made 1 Facebook post and that's a simple "May the fourth be with you" with one of those gradient backgrounds. It's been my only post each year and I strongly considered skipping it this year to throw everyone off with a "Revenge of the fifth" post just for the fun of it. But I was distracted by something else this past week, my lightsaber. Here's some rambles on my current real lightsaber build and my experience with some sabersmith companies so far.

My Lightsaber

I haven't shown it off on here yet, but I got a lightsaber made a few years ago by UltraSabers ordered with different emitter and pommel to recreate my childhood plastic Darth Maul saber. As a kid I had broken the hilt close to one of the blades so I replaced it with a pommel from a cheap Plo Koon lightsaber, and taped up with a bunch of black electrical tape to give it a dark long hilted saber look. The base hilt I got was the Dark Arbiter with the Dark Menace Emitter and the Dark Dorinian Pommel. The only issue I had was I ordered one of their UltraEdge Heavy Grade blades and they sent a regular Heavy Grade blade.

In the recent months I have been reading along to an audio book of the Ronin, A Visions Novel to help me stay focused on the words. It's a really unique take on how Sith constantly have infighting and I just love the vibe of the wandering ronin sith! There was also another episode of Star Was Visions that had a Jedi with a lightsaber that had a light ring around the emitter, just like katanas do, but it's a part of the lightsaber blade itself! I looked into if any sabersmith companies make something like this and I found the Pach Store. Not only do they have a tsuba (that's what the guard at the top of a katana, or in this case the lightsaber, is called) like the one in Star Wars Visions, but they had ones that are a part of the hilt too! And in two different styles. I ordered the light version just yesterday and will be unscrewing the few rings at the top of my lightsaber's emitter to replace it with this new tsuba. Now that I think about it, a saber Tsuba would be a really cool weapon tuning in SWtor.

On top of getting a tsuba, I am going to ordersome fake leather, cotton, or silk ito wrapping cord off of Amazon for my bottom grip. Learning to properly wrap it is going to be something fun to learn, but I don't know how I will do the final knots at the pommel because there is no hole there. It might be an aesthetic idea to let some of the cord hang at the bottom. For the top grip, however, I am going to get rubber o-rings that fit in those grooves to make it easier to grip. I can't wait to get it all together and make my saber even more unique!!

I said before that when I first ordered my saber I received the wrong blade, having ordered an UltraEdge Heavy Duty blade. UltraSaber's UltraEdge blades are misted on the inside to disperse the light more and give the blade a fuller look, which I know plenty of sights do too. What arrived in the mail was an ordinary 36 inch heavy duty blade. I wasn't too fussed because I was more focussed on the hilt, and they did give me a  50% off discount code to order another blade with which I really appreciated. I didn't do that though. I'm not too fussed about the blade and I've lost the email since so I can't now anyway. My bad.

When I was young my dad used to have a work van with lots of tradie gadgets and parts in shelving and small boxes, and I was lucky enough to be allowed to play with it all to keep me entertained whenever we'd go to a car park weekend market every now and again. What I made as a small Yoda sized hilt made with metal and PVC parts and to finish it off my dad put about a meter long piece of orange PVC pipe in it for the blade. Ever since I've always liked orange lightsaber blades and that's what I got for the internals of my real life lightsaber. Another issue with my blade, at no fault to the makers, is that it's quite heavy compared to my hilt. Which when you think about its quite odd because of how large and how many parts my hilt has, or will have eventually. I'd like my saber as a whole to balance at the top of my hand that grips the upper part, and right now it balances a bit up the blade. I by no means know how a sword or katana or lightsaber should be balanced, but this is how I'd prefer it. Once the next set of parts come in it will hopefully even out the weight, but if not I will just cut a few centimetres off the bottom of the blade until it balances just how I want it to.

As always, I hope my ramblings make sense when written down. Thanks for reading this far down! If you have any real life lightsabers, stock or custom, I'd love to see them on Twitter! There should be a panel embedded on the right of the page if you'd like to send me a picture.