I love the design of the Qui-gon saber but always wanted a deep groove version. I got one (MR LE) from a customer of mine a while back and took it to the machine shop to bore it out with a 1" hole down the neck. I got it back (its in several pieces after you take it apart) and put it in a drawer until I felt like messing with it. Recently I decided to make the inner neck piece and install electronics. It was much simpler than I thought it would be to be honest. I used a 7/8 and 1" tube to make the inner neck piece to connect the upper part to the body of the saber, cut away some of the bottom bar to accept the electronics and wired it all up.
I am very pleased with the way it turned out though it is quite heavy (they used cast AL for the body). I will say that PCing in the deep grooves was a challenge but I eventually got it to work.
It has a CF 5
LEDengin 10W RGGB
GG in parallel for main LED
RB in series for FoC
flush mount tactile switches
Powder coated in hotrod flat texture black
lightly polished shroud and emitter (didn't go crazy on the polish since this one is meant to be played with)
2x16340 LiMN batteries (not sure why I didn't go with 18350s but I may change that later since they will fit)
Again this thing is heavy and would not work very well for a belt hanger I don't think but I built it to use as my personal saber (I never get to keep CF sabers so hopefully I can keep this one lol).
Here is a video
On with the pics...sorry they are not great quality. My lighting was bad and I used software auto correct and they didn't turn out great but they should show what needs to be shown.
Click for larger images
on with the pics. THey are not very good because my lighting was bad and I used software auto fix but it shows what needs to be shown.