I came across these cool 3D printable Light Sabers by 3dprintingworld, but I couldn’t get the blade to print well. So here is a write up of my experience, and the modifications I made.

Hilt

The hilt printed well, I used Prusa Silver PLA, and nothing special needed to be done. There are many to pick from online:

There are slightly different versions of these files on thingiverse and thangs.com. The thingiverse versions seem to be the easiest to work with.

Blade

The Collapsing Blade is where I had problems. These are sets of concentric telescoping tubes that taper inwards allowing them to fit within each other but not slide out all the way. 3dprintingworld offered two techniques, print-in-place, and vase printing. The former would print the multiple tubes at the same time layer by layer. Whereas vase prints each tube individually as one continuous motion from top to bottom. The vase technique produced nicer looking blades, that were thinner yet strong. However, I couldn’t get the provided vase mode models to work, so I made my own in Fusion 360 (STL and Fusion files available here TODO).

The end result is ~110cm long, with five separate tubes. These are printed with 0.65mm extrusion width, and no top or bottom layers. I printed them all with the wider end of the tube as the base, but for the thinest one I found printing that upside down made for a cleaner end. I used Overture Purple PETG, which gave a very nice Samuel L. Jackson lightsaber.

Blade Cover

The blade fitted well, but I wanted to stop it falling out so I printed a snug fitting cover. Again this was printed in vase mode, but with a 0.55mm extrusion width, and 17 solid bottom layers (to fill up to the thin tube part). Again the STL and Fusion files available.

Finished

• Hilt - Silver PLA - Normal Settings
  • LIGHTSABER-CAP.stl and LIGHTSABER-HILT.stl.
• Blade Cover - Silver PLA - Vase Mode
  • LightSaber_Cap_v12.stl
• Blade - Purple PETG - Vase Mode
  • LightSaber_Blade_v4_1.stl - LightSaber_Blade_v4_5.stl }