Someone at my maker space suggested a couple of months ago that the wood-turners engage in a lightsaber hilt challenge in which they would turn spindles that looked like hilt designs. That was expanded to include any of the other areas in the space. I work chiefly in blacksmithing and a bit in metalworking and decided to try making a hilt. Initially, I joked that I’d just bring a piece of pipe in, as I couldn’t really imagine how I could properly blacksmith a lightsaber hilt rather than doing other sorts of metalwork.
The project did start with a steel pipe, though.
My first thought was that I would drill some holes in the bottom portion of the hilt, cut some slots along the the length at the top, and add a forged element in the form of a twisted square bar of steel. Here I’ve laid out the holes but haven’t fully drilled yet:
Because I am a poor craftsman, the holes aren’t exactly lined up in a perfect grid, though to be fair, it isn’t super easy to drill precisely into the rounded surface of a pipe. You can see in that photo too, on the left part of the pipe, the beginning of one of the slots I was going to cut into it. I used an angle grinder with a cut-off wheel to start the slots and figured I would drill holes the length of the slot to widen the gap and then file the edges of the slots to make them smooth. This turned out to be a hassle and to have a pretty ugly result (visible in one of the photos below), and I gave up on this idea when I snapped a drill bit. I cut the slotted portion of the pipe off of the rest and had to rethink my design, as the remainder of the pipe wasn’t long enough to be a hilt on its own.
I went ahead meanwhile and worked on the twisted bar that I still wanted to serve as the core of the hilt. In this photo, you can see that I’ve cut slits along the length of the bar on each side. I also cut slits in opposite corners along the length of the bar. This is how you prepare the metal to make what’s called a Rubik’s Twist.
Having done this and done some grinding on the handle part of the hilt, I had these two components:
Now I needed something else to contain the twisted core. I wondered if I could manage to forge a few helices that would connect to the handle, wrap around the twisted bar, and then come together somehow at the other end. It turns out to be pretty easy to twirl a small-gauge round bar around a thicker bar to make a long helix:
I had imagined I could cut this into several individual helices and weld them to the handle, but I simply couldn’t get the individual ones to match so that they would spiral around the twisted bar in a pleasing way. So I decided to cut shorter pieces of round bar, weld them to the handle, weld them to another small section of pipe, heat it up, and twist the handle while clamping the other end, so the the helices were correctly sized and spaced. I wasn’t at all sure it would work well, so did a test run using the ruined piece I had cut off previously. Here that one is welded together:
I made some mistakes with this one that helped me do better when I made the final version. For example, I hadn’t been very careful about measurements, so the test piece was a little out of whack:
But I had proven it essentially doable. Now I could be a bit more precise about my measurements and make another adjustment or two when moving on to the final piece. The following picture shows one of the ways you can set up your work pieces on the welding table. The red arrow is a big magnet that holds the handle upright. I had decided to use three bars to form the helices, so I lined them up every 120 degrees around the handle’s cross section and used other magnets to hold them into place for welding.
I got the pieces welded up as I had with the test piece, but more cleanly. After doing the twist, I went to the sand blasting cabinet to clean the piece up — you tend to get some crud on the metal when forging and shaping it, and the sandblaster takes that right off:
It was pretty dull looking after sandblasting, and the welds are really lumpy and ugly. It was time to take this thing to the wire wheel and belt grinder. The wire wheel is a 5- or 6-inch wheel with stiff metal bristles that spins at high velocity. I needed to use this to shine up the helices and the twisted core, which the wider flat surface of a grinding belt couldn’t reach. Then I went to the grinder to shine up the handle and tip. I also somewhere in the process welded a washer onto the smaller end to close that up and ground it smooth. I took the finished piece to the polishing wheel and loaded it up with some rouge to give this thing a bit more shine and finished with a grinder belt designed to shine things further.
Lightsabers have kyber crystals in them. The holes in the handle and the original plan to cut slots in the upper portion of the hilt were intended to create gaps through which such a crystal might be seen, but the holes in the handle don’t admit much light. So I decided to leave the butt end of the hilt open so that the crystal could be seen when looking in there. I went with a blue bit of geode because these things are hard to cut or chisel to size without destroying them. I had originally thought I’d use the green, but sizing was an issue, and it’s also not as vibrant as I had planned for.
Finally, here’s the end product:
I’m likely to polish this a bit more to submit to the competition at my maker space, but but I’m fairly satisfied to call this done. The weekend before this was due for the Creator’s Club, I had just the twisted core and the shortened handle. I put in a lot of hours over the weekend to pull everything together. It honestly looks a lot better than I thought I was capable of managing. It is, at any rate, a fair bit cooler than a simple pipe.
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