"Your Skills Are Complete."

I have been working on a few projects, including building a replacement lightsaber for Kanan:

 

 

My regiment of Tomb Guard are completely assembled and sprayed. They have been arranged on painting sticks, organized by body pose so I can paint the same details on the different body sculpts at the same time.

 

 

The musician and standard bearer have been recently built. I'm still working on the banner itself, and finishing up the sculpting on the last of their shields.

 

 

I was hoping to have Kanan and Zeb finished for this week's post (or at least one of them), but it has been a struggle to get them finished, so here's a look at some of the conversion work (and repairs) that they've undergone.

 
Zeb's miniature includes the option to assemble him with his Bo-rifle either extended or collapsed. I'm not a fan of the electricity on the tips, so I opted to have him holding it like a rifle. I felt that the weapon looked a bit short, though, so I extended it with some styrene rod. After cutting the weapon in half and spacing out the pieces to match the length of the extended Bo-rifle, I marked and cut a length of 2mm styrene rod.

 

 

I trilled through the rod with a pin vise and inserted a length of wire to pin the pieces together.

 

 

Those parts were dry-fit to see how everything looked when assembled. Turns out it didn't look that great with just a plain rod in the middle. And– it turns out that the weapon is actually shortened in the show when collapsed into rifle mode.

 

 

So, I compromised and shortened it a bit. It's longer than it used to be, and the top handle doubling up with the central rod doesn't make it look as spindly. I'm satisfied.

 

 

Most of my painting this past week has been focused on Kanan. I was really struggling with the eyes. His left eye turned out perfect on the first go, but for the life of me I could not get the right eye to match. I must have gone over it three or four times, each attempt worse than the last, and I was risking clogging his face with too many layers of paint. (This is a shot taken with the magnifier feature on my phone. Yeesh! The paint texture on his face looks terrible!)

 

"Sloth love Hera!"

 

I put the miniature aside (and worked on the Tomb Guard) and went back to it a few days later. This time I was able to do the right eye justice. It's not a 100% match, but it's close enough. At a normal viewing distance his tiny head looks just fine. 

 

 

And, of course, I broke his lightsaber.

 

 

I appreciate Atomic Mass Games' accuracy in matching Star Wars: Rebels' classic Ralph McQuarrie aesthetic with his needle-thin lightsaber blades, but man these things are delicate. 

 

 

I decided to replace the blade with a metal wire, and while I was at it, add the round disc below the emitter to better match the show:

 

 

The wire I settled on was a piece of guitar string. (Technically it's a bass string; I've had this in my hobby supplies for ages, so I don't know which chord it was– It's one of the thinner ones.) Bass string is really stiff and doesn't bend easily, so it was be perfect to replace the blade. I unwound the coiled wire exposing the core. The wire at the core is about the same thickness as the blade (a bit thinner than a standard paperclip).

 

 

I used a thin drill bit and a pin vise to carefully drill into the tip of the emitter where the new blade would be inserted. I had to take extra care, because the miniature was already painted and I didn't want to damage my hard work. Note: When cutting guitar or bass string, don't use your good clippers, because the wire is steel and will notch the blade!

 
If you are replacing a lightsaber blade, you can simply insert the new metal blade into the hilt and then paint it. Since I was rebuilding the top of the lightsaber handle, I carefully sliced off the tip of the emitter just above Kanan's hands. 

 

 

For the disc, I used 2mm styrene rod. I drilled into the center of rod to create a hole, and then carefully rolled the rod under my knife blade to slice off a thin disc. (Drilling the hole beforehand is essential because it would be too difficult to hold the tiny piece and accurately drill it.)

 

 

Those two bits were slid over the wire, and you can see how they look. Before gluing them in place, I used a metal file to round off the tip of the saber and sand the length of the blade to make it a bit more coarse so it would hold the primer and paint better.

 

 

And that was the last I ever saw of that lightsaber blade. Literally, after taking that photo, I was putting the end if the wire into a pair of vise grip pliers to hold it for priming and painting, and the grips pinched too tight and shot the part across the room. I could hear it ricocheting and it sounded like it landed close by (the room is not that big), but after scouring every inch of the place for over an hour, I could not find it. Anywhere!

 
So, had to build another blade, this time building the emitter too out of a piece of thinner rod– I drilled through the rod, and then sliced into it vertically to remove a section of one side. I also used the opportunity to make the emitter a little taller to match the show. 

 

 

'Til next time!