Project: OZ-13MS Gundam Epyon Part 5

I knew from the start that the giant beam saber was going to be a critical component of the finished model. I wanted the entire saber effect to glow bright green and that was going to be a challenge. At first I toyed with the idea of inserting a flat LED into the base of the saber effect and running wires through the hilt and into the hip.

While there was ample space to place the LED in the base of the saber effect, there was the issue of connecting it to the power source. I felt a bit nervous about trying to solder the connections so close to the hilt. So I decided to go with resin casting with the intention of being able to embed a string of LEDs into the saber effect. 

Yeah... working with translucent resins and dyes is trickier then it first seems.

 

This was my first attempt with green dye and supposedly clear resin. Yeah.... apparently when this company says 'clear' they actually mean 'amber clear'. So adding green dye produces this blue color. Believing I had somehow screwed up the cast, I attempted several more casts with this type of resin, and they all gave me similar blue colors. I turned to Jeff over at Dragon Forge Design for some advise on resins for this purpose. He pointed at at Smooth-Ons Smooth-Cast 327 series of tintable resins. So I ordered a trial pack and the sample pack of their 'So Strong dyes'. Getting tired of trying to do green, and wanting to try something in red. So I tried again with 1 once of the Smooth-Cast 327 and a drop of red dye. And I do mean 'a drop'. I took a tooth pick, dipped it in the red and allowed a single drop to roll off the tooth pick into the resin before mixing it. This combination produced the following:

It is a very solid and very nearly totally opaque red. It looks kind of cool, but it wouldn't work for my purposes. I did try putting a super-bright LED to the red resin just to see how much light did come through. In a totally dark room, with not other light sources what so ever, it just barely glowed at all. Far too dark for what I was going for. So I went back to experimentation working with differing concentrations of dye in the volume of resin. I used rock molds to avoid wearing out the saber effect mold I had made.

I finally settled on an approximate ration of resin to dye by mixing up 1 1/2 ounces of resin and adding about half a drop of dye from the very tip of a pin. Yeah when they decided to call there dye series 'So Strong' they picked the right name. With a good ratio figured out, I went to work building the LED array to embed in the cast. I settled on a series of four flat LEDs to get the proper brightness. It took some finagling, but I managed to get the LEDs roughly in the middle of the mold and the resin properly cast around them.