For international Star Wars day we're going to show you how we built the
world's first real-life Kylo Ren proto saber make sure you watch the whole
video because we're gonna do a massive Star Wars giveaway including your very
own lightsaber thanks to our sponsor honey.
May the 4th be with you!
Kylo Ren has a badass lightsaber not only does it have a unique cross guard
but according to lore, Kylo constructed it with a craft Kyber crystal giving it
a violent unstable appearance and sound.
I'll let you in on a little secret we've
actually been developing our own Kylo Ren lightsaber behind the scenes for
well over the past year we even have a few ideas how to create the crack
crystal look as well.
So why don't we catch you up on the progress so far.
If you've been following our channel, you know that lightsabers are nothing new
for us. In fact our very first lightsaber build was already almost three years ago.
Look at that red-hot steel oh my god it works, guys, guys it actually works!
And thankfully that first build was the only one that resulted in emergency services showing up.
Since then we've been through several iterations and with each version
we've learned something new.
Our first experiment used pure tungsten as a blade
running over 10 kilowatts of electricity through it resulted in a hot yellow glow
but we discovered that tungsten flakes off material at this temperature,
releases a lot of potentially poisonous gases and gets floppy.
Our second iteration featured a stainless steel ball screw threaded core, covered in a
ceramic insulator with nitonal wire wrapped around the grooves.
This glowed a solid orange yellow, but the longer it was on, the weaker the steel core became
resulting in a floppy lightsaber.
Not unlike the Schwartz lightsaber rings from Spaceballs.
Oh, and it was high voltage DC which is rather dangerous as you can see
we had some rather bright arc flashes when the whole blade shorted out.
Which brings us to our third iteration.
A titanium shell over a ceramicly
insulated tungsten core. By running about 20 kilowatts of electricity through it
the titanium glows yellow white-hot at around 1500 Celsius but because tungsten
has a much higher melting point than titanium, the blade remains rigid and solid.
Since this discovery we've refined both the manufacturing process and the
size of both the titanium and tungsten for optimal performance and we're quite
happy with how robust the new blades are compared to our first attempts.
If you want an in-depth look at our entire development process make sure you check
those videos out.
Once we were happy with our finalized
prototype it was time to build a second lightsaber so we can live out every Star
Wars fans fantasy, a lightsaber duel.
I mean what's really the point otherwise?
Make sure you check out that video as it was one of the most dangerous things
we've ever done...
On camera anyway.
That's enough of a history lesson it's time to build a lightsaber.
I've actually been working on this
for over a year now right after building the first titanium
lightsaber I started thinking if I can get one blade red-hot,
why not three?
All I would need to do is electrically connect the three blades
and series in such a way that it fits inside of the hilt and can handle a
couple thousand amps without melting.
Pretty simple, right?
With a series configuration each blade will heat up
the same amount because they all have the same current.
I decided to go with metal 3d printing because well, printing
titanium is really cool and it lets me create some interesting geometry that
would be really difficult to machine.
Okay the design is done now we just need
to get a metal 3d printed luckily James used to work with Mark Barfoot who is
the director of additive manufacturing at EWI.
Mark and EWI were instrumental in
making this possible.
We just sent them the CAD model and he
took care of the rest.
Oddly enough EWI didn't actually print any of the parts
themselves because we couldn't get any machine time.
Instead they got EOS in
Germany to print the copper parts.
And then got Renishaw to print the titanium parts.
Renishaw actually has a Kitchener office meaning that we got to go see the
parts being printed firsthand.
Alright we're at Renishaw and I'm super excited because the parts are coming out of the machine today!
Oh! There it is!
Looking good.
So basically we work through the glovebox to get all the powder out of the machine.
I'm gonna self isolate, you guys can look through the window and I'll just vacuum the bolts.
Pull it out and then you guys come back in when I get
on the bench and do some shots of the parts.
When you're working with metal powders, things can be
quite explosive or dangerous so, because of that we have to be outside of the
room right now while he's just finishing up processing the parts.
It's really coarse right now.
I'm hoping that we can keep that finish.
Yeah this looks really nice though go I'm excited to put it together.
I'm really hoping my tolerances fit well.
Ok so this slots onto this,
and then this piece screws onto both of them and holds it all together
So the interesting thing is: this is the kind of thing you can do with 3d
printing that's more difficult with machining.
Is that both this piece and this piece
are threaded separately and then this threads on over top.
Aright so as you know Kylo Ren's lightsaber is a little bit different
than every other lightsaber we've seen in Star Wars.
In addition to having the
cross guard it also uses a cracked Kyber crystal which gives the blade a very
unstable crackling effect.
Well I've got two commonly available chemicals here,
cupric chloride and strontium chloride.
These are used in fireworks, cupric
chloride glows a nice green and strontium a red it's used in road flares as well.
And to demonstrate I've got some on the table right here.
Alright let's try the cupric chloride first.
Nice blue green, look at that!
Cool and then we have the strontium.
Which burns- whoo nice and red.
What we've done is we've taking these basic chemicals
which are actually salts technically and we've
mixed them with a binder.
So I don't know if you can see that but we have the
cupric chloride over here and we have the strontium chloride over here.
So hypothetically we're gonna get red flame here, green flame there, which means
we'll be able to have a colored lightsaber.
Ready?
Don't breathe this...!
Will it ignite that is the question or will it just suffocate us with poisonous fumes?
Well it's on fire but not in color.
Well that's disappointing.
So to answer the question now we cannot color the lightsaber blade.
Unless we make one out of plasma.
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Alright I got all the 3d printed
parts and they look amazing the next step is to remove all the support
material, this stuff here and that might be difficult because it's also titanium
so cutting off titanium is difficult, we'll see how that goes.
Okay that was difficult to say the least, turns out titanium is very hard...
Very difficult to work with in general so, I managed to get it out.
I went through several grinding discs, endmills,
all sort of drill bits it just destroys everything.
But, we got it.
The next step is to-
I still need to machine this surface off.
Drill them out and then tap these holes and then machine some of the
inner components.
Let's get started.
Well that doesn't seem to be working.
Alrighty...
I've probably destroyed that bit and I've taken pretty well nothing off.
Okay, I swapped it out for a bigger tool hopefully this will work.
Seems to be working so far.
I'm making these Teflon brackets in order to hold the copper emitters.
These electrically insulate it from the rest of the system while holding it firm.
Which is what I need, firm...
Okay so the next step is to tap this hole right here,
and it's going to be very difficult because, again, titanium is just very hard.
Last time I did this was aluminum and it was still very hard I've gone ahead made
a custom tool. Just a big bar to give me lots of leverage.
Let's see how this goes.
It's easy so far but I'm only just getting started.
And I have a lot of leverage.
Alight then.
My next step is to tap this hole
and I'm worried about that because the last time I tapped something on it,
that was this one right here, I broke the tap.
This is a much finer tap so I'm
concerned it's not going to go well.
But let's give it a go.
So that actually worked.
But I think I've ruined my tap, but it did work.
I'm just going to give these copper parts a quick shine with the wire brush.
I'm making some battery bus bars so that I can
connect the eight Gens' tattu batteries in parallel.
That is awesome just need to wire it up and then we can turn it on,
I've got some stainless steel sheathing which I'm gonna use to protect the wires.
Last time I used fiberglass but I thought this would look nicer.
Alright this is the final step just need to plug in these wires.
Which lead to the battery terminals
and then we'll be ready to test.
It's all done, all I need to do is plug it in.
I'm gonna use the same battery
pack as the last lightsaber for our lightsaber duel you should check out
that video, just need to plug it in.
Of course the circuit diagram is the same
as the last one, I'm using the same contactor if you missed that you can
check it out on maker.io.
Super excited to turn this on for the first
time I started this project way before the quarantine but since then I've been
working on weekends so...
All alone here, might as well try it out.
Here we go.
Heating up.
Oh yeah!
Look at that.
Yeah, that's pretty hot.
Aright I'm happy with that. You happy with that?
I'm just gonna leave a note here for James so he can find this on Monday.
I think he'll like it.
Ian said he left a surprise for me here.
Did he finish the Kylo Ren lightsaber?!
Don't burn your hand off.
Who do I look like? Anakin?
Let's turn this thing on!
Alright here-
I should probably wear safety glasses.
Knowing Ian made this.
And I should probably turn off the lights.
Hey Jarvis! Can you turn the lights off?
Oh, that's got some weight to it.
The three tungsten blades, it is pretty heavy.
I'm kind of nervous to turn on.
You can see it's just starting to heat up there...
And now that- Oh...
That is freaking cool.
A bright, glowing, Kylo Ren proto-saber.
Man I thought the heat off the old proto sabers was a lot
but like, ohhh!
This is highly dangerous.
Let's go test her out.
Hey, what are those?
Who left these balloons here?
That's frickin sweet!
Alright this just might be my favourite lightsabre we built yet it is freaking
awesome, the 3d printed titanium looks amazing, I think it's probably our most
authentic Star Wars project we've done.
Now you guys are gonna want to make sure
you subscribe to our channel because we're not done with lightsabers yet.
First of all we may or may not be collaborating with a certain famous
youtuber to let him try out this lightsaber.
And second of all, we've
already started designing a retractable plasma based lightsaber. Which will be
the world's most realistic lightsaber.
And we figured out how to make that one a different color.
So make sure you're subscribed, hit that notification bell
and if you want to win that Star Wars
giveaway make sure you guys sign up for Honey using the link below.