Batmobile prop

Status: completed

So Halloween gets a little crazy at work.  Different departments decorate their areas in a friendly competition; the winning group gets pizza and parents bring their kids in to see the decorations and beg for candy.  It's win-win.

It's also an excuse for me to build ridiculous things.

My group chose a superhero theme, and I decided I should turn our glass-walled data center into the Batcave.  I'd put a Batmobile inside, and make people wonder how I got a full-sized vehicle through the door.

There isn't much to talk about here in terms of technique; the entire thing was build out of scrap wood and scavenged supplies, with the exception of the 2x4 "frame rails" and the box of wood screws that hold it all together.  It was hacked together any which way I could, over a single weekend.

• It's 12' long, in two sections than can be separated and carried sideways through a door
• The wheels are off of my old Jetta, so they're full-size
• The fenders are kerf-bent luan
• The whole thing sits on a pair of milk crates and the wheels aren't attached, they just sit there, so the whole thing can be easily moved in pieces

Here are a few pics of the process:

Custom toy lightsabers

Status: complete

Building a lightsaber is an attractive project to a lot of nerdy makers (is that redundant?) because of the lore (a Jedi must construct his own), because at their core, they're not too complicated (a flashlight and a tube), and because they look damn cool.  I'd read up a bit on the state of the art and was shocked at the volume of materials to make "custom" lightsabers.  Arguably, piecing together a saber from pre-made parts isn't entirely custom, any more than buying a Harley off the lot and swapping out for some non-stock chrome parts is truly "custom", but people should do what they like.

I like to make Christmas gifts, I try to make something unique for at least one person each season, and this season I thought my two nephews might like some custom sabers.

Over on the forums for the Custom Saber Shop, I found some people doing neat things with PVC pipe instead of turned metals, and that was appealing to me because I wouldn't need much in the way of tooling.  Taking inspiration from posts there, and some youtube vids, I soon had a basic saber design.

Something I tried that I saw in metal sabers but didn't see anyone else doing in PVC was to put lengthwise fluting in the grip.  This seemed do-able using a jig, a router table, a fence, and some evenly spaced reference marks on the work-piece.

These would be toys for kids, and so I wanted them to be durable, and repairable.  I made them out of thick stock and chose translucent tubing with a 1/8" sidewall for durability.  I also wanted to mount all the innards on a module that could slide out for servicing or repair.  Again, looking to the forums for inspiration, I decided on a "sled" design.

I took the guts from a $15 (on sale) toy saber that already had sound effects and motion sensing built in.  I used the sound part as-is, and use the LED output to drive a transistor that switched a much more powerful 1 watt LED.  I mounted it all up and slid it into the PVC handle.

Hammertone and other metallic paints make it look... sort of metal-ish.

I thought my sister might not like a 4 year old and an 8 year old running around with 4-foot-long light-up baseball bats in the house, so I included "safety plugs" that lit up, but didn't extend past the hilt for indoor play.

But I think they look cooler with the full blades on them.

They were very well-received.  ^^

Gallery of other projects

If you want to check out some older projects, or builds that I haven't written up yet, head over to my Flickr album here.