4000° PLASMA PROTO-LIGHTSABER BUILD (RETRACTABLE BLADE!)

Hello! We just created the world's first

plasma

-based

retractable

lightsaber

. Many thanks to our YouTube members and Patreon followers for supporting the channel. They get tons of perks, including seeing our videos before anyone else, like the

lightsaber

test video that's available on our channel. right now for members A true

plasma

-based

retractable

lightsaber, the pinnacle of sci-fi technology and probably one of the most sought-after fictional technologies of all time. As you know, we have been developing different lightsabers or as they are called in the Star Wars story

proto

types. sabers for the last four years. From some initial power supply tests that caused the fire department to call us to version one using nitinol wire and version two using a version 2.1 tungsten titanium hybrid

blade

so we could duel with sabers light in real life that along the way was extremely unsafe until finally arriving at our kylo ren style lightsaber, complete with a 3D printed titanium hilt.

A

proto

-saber, of course, is a lightsaber with an external power source, since you know we don't exactly have d-sized batteries capable of shutting down. more energy than a nuclear power plant, which by the way is what you would need for a lightsaber to work like it does in the movies. Now, in my opinion, what we've done so far are some of the closest representations of lightsabers in real life. technologies, they look like a lightsaber, they sound like a lightsaber and at temperatures over 3000 degrees, they actually cut things like a lightsaber. But as you know, the internet is not easily pleased, those are just red hot sticks, it's just a piece of red hot metal that's not even a real lightsaber, your lightsaber sucks and you should feel bad too.

Luckily, I have thick skin as I read over half a million comments on my YouTube channel. That's equivalent to about 200 complete novels, by the way. So despite the trolls, the best. Hopefully we haven't given up, which is good, since you know, you can count on one hand the number of people in this world who actually work on lightsaber technology. Anyway, how the hell do you make a plasma-based lightsaber? The best theories say that the plasma is held in a beam by a magnetic field, which scientifically proves that the problem is producing an electromagnetic field strong enough to hold a sheet.

Well, the lightsaber would literally have to be built inside a box lined with electromagnets which makes it kind of a useless Science Project. I made a lightsaber. Fortunately, we came up with an alternative solution to control the plasma flow, allowing us to make a retractable

blade

and even change its color. We'll use laminar flow, you know, that cool stuff. where liquids flow smoothly In fact, we teased this project months ago on our Instagram, which perhaps we shared too soon, as it resulted in almost all the new comments being where is the lightsaber? I mean, come on guys, it may not be brain surgery, but

build

ing a lightsaber is basically rocket science, it's taken us quite a few months to get it right and we also had to upgrade our equipment in the workshop to be able to make it like our new Tormach 1100 mx cnc machine complete with a fourth axis.

Bogdan was very excited to try it. and since Star Wars was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, it's only fitting that our first real plasma lightsaber would be steampunk. I think it's Bogdan's turn to design that grip. Steampunk is a subset of science fiction that incorporates the ancient design aesthetics of the 19th century with modern technologies. When I was looking for some inspirations for the lightsaber design, I came across this image and it instantly caught my attention. I think steampunk would be great for this design because we are going to use a lot of gauges, valves, copper tubes and regulators that will look perfect in this installation.

Here is the final design of a lightsaber hilt. It incorporates many materials including brass, copper, stainless glass and even leather to give it that true steampunk look which I have even decided to add. the kyber crystal heating chamber using EL wire and a neon bulb so it looks really cool in the dark The copper tubes that carry our flammable gases are nice and visible and the adjustment knobs are easy to access Thanks to our new Tormach machines we are now able to manufacture much more complex designs like this, let's make it a reality. This video is sponsored by AFK Arena AFK Arena is a light RPG, the best RPG for busy people, as you know we are always very busy here at Hacksmith Industries, which is why we like it afk arena is a style of Rewarding and simple role-playing game, so it does not require a large investment of time, is easy to access and can be played casually, when you have time.

I've actually caught the team messing around between tasks, but Hey, okay, how's it going? oh you ain't even scheming, you're playing a game, what are you doing man? Playing AFK Arena, come on, it runs itself. Fight demons, get epic gear, collect heroes and level up, unlike most RPGs, AFK also has a cool fresh art style. which makes it very different from all the others, it is refreshing Team up with seven unique factions and different unions of heroes to improve your strategy and reach the top With so many different characters to choose from, you will feel like a collector and also if you use my link below you can get a special hero, either Zafrael or Lucretia, your elite celestial and hypogean heroes.

Take the opportunity and download AFK arena today and also help support our channel. Oh my gosh, that looks amazing. Yeah, well, put on some gloves. I'm sorry, I can not. getting spots on a lightsaber That's amazing I think you've outdone yourself on this Bogdan Look at the detail that if that's not steampunk I don't know what is But the real question is, how are we going to power this? ? Even with all of our new equipment and capabilities here at Hacksmith Industries, we're still subject to the laws of thermodynamics, which means we're still going to have to turn this into a proto saber with a power pack separate from the hilt.

We've made incredibly energy-dense power packs before, but to get enough power for a plasma-based lightsaber, we'll have to use something with a more energy-dense fuel, in this case, compressed liquid propane gas, which can give us 50 times more. energy per kilogram than a lipo. That's a pretty incredible difference and the good thing is that you probably have this at home. We are talking about the normal propane that you use in your barbecue. So how do we turn propane into a superheated plasma beam? The answer lies in one of the most satisfactory demonstrations of the physical phenomena of laminar fluid flow.

Basically, we need a large array of laminar flow nozzles to create a highly concentrated gas flow to create a plasma beam. Luckily for us, we're not the only ones who need this and highly specialized gas nozzles like this can be found at a pretty high price. This nozzle costs more than four thousand dollars and is used in the glass blowing industry to reach the maximum temperature, we need complete combustion, which means that in addition to this propane, in fact, we will also use oxygen. That doesn't sound dangerous, right? Anyway, let's see how it works. First we turn on the propane, then we turn on the oxygen, some safety glasses and the spark.

So look at that, isn't that a lightsaber? This beam is really cool, it actually burns at around 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which means it's capable of cutting through a lot of things. Should we cut some things? Wow, this is actually our old lightsaber blade made of titanium and look, it's already red hot. That's so brilliant, Jesus. The really cool thing about making a flame like this is that we can color it using salts. Let's start with some boric acid. What color do you think the blade will turn? Do you have your guesses? Look at that Next we have calcium chloride Look at that red orange, it almost hurts to look at We have some strontium chloride Wow, that's like a road flare, this really hurts to look at Look at that Finally we have some sodium chloride aka like salt And look we have Rey's lightsaber right here Isn't that cool?

So we can produce a blue lightsaber, a green lightsaber, a red lightsaber, an amber lightsaber, and even a yellow lightsaber. How amazing is that? I should probably turn this off though. That required a lot of adjustment to get the blade to the right length and turning it off wasn't the most elegant thing. Fortunately, Bogdan is going to make a circuit with two fancy valves, which means that we will actually be able to have a computer control the flow of gas to allow it to be turned on and retracted with the push of a button. So I'll let Bogdan handle that.

After twelve weeks of anticipation, we finally got proportional control valves. This will allow us to control exactly how much gas enters the lightsaber and therefore make it extend and retract. Now we just have to figure out how to control it and to do that I'll make a custom printed circuit board. use Altium Designer which is the industry standard for PCB design software and is super powerful. This is the printed circuit board that Charles designed for use in the Crysis arm, but since both projects use pneumatic valves and auxiliary outputs, we will be able to use it for our lightsaber with some minor modifications.

This board looks great. If you want to see this PCB yourself, you can use the Altium viewer. One of the only machines we don't have in the shop is a PCB milling machine, but why would we buy one of those where websites like JLCPCB will allow us to order high-quality boards in a matter of days for just two dollars for five boards? . We would need about 15,000 plates to offset the cost of one of those machines. Let's order these while we wait. That's why I'm going to es- Well, that was quick, let's start welding. Well, to better understand how the lightsaber electronics work, visit our page at maker.io.

We have to

build

a steampunk power pack with these parts. Chris takes care of that. Well, all of this needs to be polished before I can start building. I'll let Dave handle that. It's not right, I'll do it myself. We did it. The world's first plasma-based retractable lightsaber. Now, obviously, we're going to have an awesome test video for this. We have tons of things lined up behind us to really put this to the test, including cutting through a steel door. Anyway, that video is available right now for our Patreon supporters and YouTube members, which is a great time to support the channel and watch this video early.

For everyone else, it will be out next week. Thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe.