hey guys, it's time to continue our lightsaber build! earlier this summer we released a video showing off our attempt at building a power supply for our very own proto-saber. that's right a prototype lightsaber. it's a thing look it up. now, needless to say it didn't go so well in fact even the fire department showed up. and if you want to see that whole video you can click on it right in there. anyways that video was just about the power supply, but a bunch of you guys had some ideas about what we're actually gonna do for the lightsaber and a few of you actually got it right, even fewer still, looked at the description below the video and follow that link to see the complete circuit diagram and our plan for the lightsaber you see we were actually planning on using tungsten rod for the blade of the sabre now tungsten actually has a melting point of
3400 celsius or over 6000 fahrenheit that's really really hot in fact if we could heat it up to just about 2,000 celsius it would be able to melt through almost anything including steel. so to test that out we actually bought some tungsten from torrey hills technologies on amazon.com now tungsten is actually pretty pricey so they gave us a 50% discount which was awesome if you guys want to get your own, there's a link in the description below. anyway, we discovered a slight issue with using tungsten for the lightsaber blade, you see when tungsten gets to around a thousand celsius it actually starts oxidizing, which means it starts smoking and small bits of metal actually start flaking off, which isn't really ideal for a lightsaber and that actually should have been pretty obvious because lightbulbs are actually filled with an inert gas
now hypothetically to get around the oxidization problem we could actually pipe in a noble gas like nitrogen over the entire blade while we're using it but that would add a lot of complexity to the design, and it's just a path we don't really want to go down. the other big issue with using tungsten is the power requirements. to heat this up red-hot requires a few thousand amps at 24 volts. now 24 volts it's perfectly safe, you're not going to electrocute yourself. i mean you will burn yourself very badly we've got a lot of work to do *agonized yelling* the issue here is to create a power supply that can switch high current is actually really expensive and difficult after all that's why
911 got called on us last time. so we had to come up with a new plan and a few of our fans actually suggested some really good ideas especially one of our fans that we met in michigan during the artprize he researched another metal we could use called kanthal now kanthal is actually very similar to nitinol, which is used as a heating element. but it's stable up to 1,400 celsius, which is still hot enough to be able to cut through most things the issue though is you can't actually get kanthal in rod form like this you can actually only get it in wire form at least that's all we were able to find. and the thickest wire we could find was only 16 gauge which is really thin. now the tricky part with having a thinner wire is you actually need a much higher voltage to push that power through the wire and to heat up the amount of wire
we're gonna be using will actually need around 300vdc and 300 volts dc is a lethal amount of voltage. it's only gonna be running about 20 amps so the total power draw is around 6 kilowatts which is still pretty impressive the nice thing is we don't have a ground loop so it actually be quite a challenge to electrocute yourself from the saber, but keep in mind this is a high voltage device and we have to be careful when we're using it. the other really nice thing about this design is it's a lot easier to switch a power supply at 300 volts and only 20 amps compared to a 24 volt 3000 amp power supply in fact we can actually just do it with a single mosfet
but more on that later so without further ado, the new plan: we're gonna take a stainless steel rod just like this we're gonna wrap it in ceramic insulation and then using our lathe we're gonna wrap the camco wire all the way around it and it's actually going to connect at the end to complete the circuit feed this with 300 volts at about 20 amps and we'll have a yellow hot rod of destruction! let me show you on a smaller scale. since this is a shorter length of wire we actually need about 24 volts to get it going okay, so we plug this into the battery then you connect the other one like this wah, and then we take these woo and we attach it like so give it a few seconds to heat up
and obviously with a higher voltage we can get heat up even faster, and as you can see it's getting r- **** getting red-**** safety first, thank you gentlemen safety first all right, let's try this again. and as you can see it gets red hot super fast and the heat is coming off of this is crazy anyways something like this is all well and good but how are we gonna actually make it look like a real lightsaber and sound like one too well our friends at sabre experts hooked us up this is actually an antique flash handle, the same kind used for lightsabers in the original star wars movies so we're going to be using this as the hilt now remember
this is going to be a proto saber, which means we're gonna have a cable going from this to the battery pack because we can't get enough power into the hilt of this at least not with today's technology now to make it sound like a lightsaber we actually have a sound module from the lightsabers that saber experts make and basically it's actually got a small imu on it, so when you swing it around it will actually make the saber sounds of you swinging it around so not only will our saber actually work and cut through things it'll sound like one too. anyway enough talking about it let's put it together but before that i want to tell you about this videos sponsor: storyblocks, now obviously building prototypes of fictional things isn't cheap and
off youtube ads alone we can't support this kind of engineering. in fact, it's a miracle we've even gotten this far, now storyblocks is cool because it helps us with content production it has stock images, vectors, icons and more that you can use in your web projects videos or pretty much whatever you want. it has a growing library of over 400,000 assets once you download something from the library, it's yours to keep and use forever. in fact, we used story blocks to create an infographic for this very video. so if you want to help support the channel and ensure we can keep making awesome projects just like this one check out link in the description below to start your free 7 day trial of storyblocks now, back to the build alright so the team has been hard at work, and we have the first proto saber prototype finished.
and we're about to turn it on for the very first time now as i mentioned earlier we are working with a bit of a higher voltage, which does mean there's a few safety concerns. so we have a few safety precautions here, got a co2 fire extinguisher here right now we've got a ripcord which dave is manning and basically if he pulls this it unplugs the battery and kills all the power if ian starts to get electrocuted bogdan has a wooden pokey stick that he can poke ian's dead body with and then we can get on with our day, so this is just a temporary battery box. it's actually off of our batman baja project it's basically just holding all the batteries together. later on we will actually be building the proto sabre power pack which will actually be like a backpack
holding all the batteries for you to use the proto sabre. so, i think we're ready to turn on all i have to do... it's not on yet all i have to do is plug in this red wire and we'll be live. and one note, we're actually running this a hundred and fifty volts dc at the moment, which is technically still kind of safe but if it goes well, we're gonna up it to three hundred volts which will get it even hotter so ian: and if we need to, we can take it to 400. james: up to four hundred volts so that'll be extra hot also i don't know if you guys can see this, but it's powered by amd inside
all right, so that's just a sound effect module which is pretty cool yeah, and we also have the blaster sound effect alright, so when ian presses the big button, it's gonna turn on the actual saber, i'm just gonna back up don't mind me ian is wearing highly insulated gloves, so uh... should be fine, and yep, we're getting some heat. getting a bit smoky now 150 volts dc might not be actually enough to get the metal red or even yellow hot so we'll give it another 30 seconds or so, and if it's not getting much hotter we're gonna have to crank up the voltage smells good.
we got some red. it's getting orange right there, and i can feel the heat wave from over here we might need to wear those silver volcano suits when we actually test this thing otherwise we might be getting a tan alright as you can see the tip is getting orange hot and it's actually gonna move along and the whole thing should become orange hot and then if there's enough power you might even become yellow hot. ian just wait. ian: i think we should crank it up. james: yeah, all right we're gonna we're gonna give it more power.ian: there is six batteries in here now. we're going to add another six james: and each of these batteries can put out like almost 300 amps all right, so we doubled the batteries in the battery pack and now we're talking about 300 volts dc
which should turn this red hot pretty quick and subsequently yellow hot and it'll be ready to burn through some things all right yeah there we go ian: i'm not pressing the button, but it seems like its still on. there appears to be a slight issue with the mosfet and it's not turning itself off so we're gonna pull that wire nice big spark there, and that's cooling down. so as you can see we have a few issues to sort out, but in the next video we're gonna finish the battery pack and actually test this by cutting through a door
so stay tuned for that and make sure you subscribe and make sure you have notifications turned on because you are not gonna want to miss this all. alright, just gonna take an epic thumbnail shot for this, and i'm gonna. hopefully look cool while holding it trying not to burn myself i can feel the heat in my face already. *cameraman instructions* cameraman: just move only the sword yes like that and put your hands up a bit higher like this but look forward kind of like you know how they stand like this in the game stuff. james: i'm getting a tan holy **** this is hot. well that's all for now make sure you subscribe notifications turned on you're not going to miss the next test if you guys haven't checked
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