Engineer James Hobson has a YouTube channel called Hacksmith, where he and his teammates – Dave Bonhoff, Ian Hillier, and Darryl Sherk – show off gadgets that they’ve designed and engineered and built themselves. They aim to inspire youth into science, engineering, and technology by taking fictional ideas from movies, comics, and video games and making real working prototypes.
Some of their latest creations include Captain America’s electromagnetic shield, Thor’s Hammer, a Batman grappling hook, an Ironman repulsor, and a Star Wars lightsaber. And they’re all the real deal! For example, the lightsaber is a plasma-based retractable lightsaber, not an LED-lit plastic stick. It’s retractable and burns at 2,200°C (4,000°F), which is hot enough to cut through a sheet of steel!
Hobson explains how they went about making the device in the video:
How the heck do you build a plasma-based lightsaber?
Even with all of our new equipment and capabilities, we’re still bound by the laws of thermodynamics.
Well, theories say that plasma is best held in a beam by a magnetic field, which, scientifically, checks out. The issue is producing a strong enough electromagnetic field to contain a blade, well the lightsaber would have to be quite literally built inside a box coated in electromagnets, which turns it into a kind of useless science project.
To get around this, they used liquid petroleum gas (LPG) as fuel and mixed it with oxygen, resulting in superheated plasma. To capture the plasma into a beam, they employed the laminar flow principle by sending the gas + oxygen mix through a laminar nozzle typically used for glass blowing. The nozzle ensures a highly concentrated flow of gas, while the addition of oxygen to the mixture helps deliver the beam length.
It’s even possible to alter the color of the beam by adding chemicals to the mix. Boric acid turns the beam green, sodium chloride turns it yellow, calcium chloride amber, and strontium chloride red.
Hobson said as he showed off the lightsabers color-changing effects:
That is so bright…this actually hurts to look at.
The only difference between his lightsaber and the one’s Jedi’s use in the Star Wars movies is that it needs to be connected to a power source – a custom-built backpack that carries the LPG and oxygen.
In their next YouTube video, they’re going to demonstrate how the device can slice through a steel door! But for now, you can watch how they made lightsaber from scratch in the video below.
