A lightsaber is the primary weapon of the sith and jedi orders in Star Wars: having him in real life is the dream of many fans of the saga. A youtuber achieved a Guinness record by making one, which is an engineering masterpiece.
The award went to the first retractable lightsaber.
It happened in 2022. Alex Burkan, content creator on YouTube, works mostly with 3D printing. But all his life he thought about how to make a lightsaber in the best style of Star Wars.
The result: a saber that produces a plasma blade over a meter long, with temperatures of over 2,800°C.
The blade is for cutting steel!
Burkan tells how he came to create his own lightsaber: “Since 2013, the main field of my research and work was hydrogen generation equipment, so I decided I could build something.”
“Each step during the development and construction process was a challenge,” says the youtuber in his conversation with Guinness.
The path to the Star Wars-like lightsaber
The first thing he did was design high-pressure equipment to fit the saber: “The key component of my lightsaber is an electrolyzer, a device that can generate large amounts of hydrogen and oxygen and compress the gas to any pressure, without a mechanical compressor”.
The youtuber was able to adapt the hydrogen and oxygen burner to have the required shape and length for his lightsaber.
“The most challenging job,” Burkan says, “was squeezing the entire gas distribution system onto the handle of a lightsaber.”
Once the objective was achieved, he tested it by cutting metal. It is impressive to see it in action.
However, the saber that received the Guinness record is only a prototype that works for only 30 seconds at full power. “It’s not as stable as it could be, and you can easily see it when it moves,” he stresses.
“I think science will help us and we can finally get the lightsaber closer to the movie version.”