Make a Lightsaber

This post was sponsored by Duracell Ultra Batteries.

With all the hype around the new Star Wars movie, my kids have been eyeing off the lightsabers in the shops for a while now. But I’m a party pooper, so I said no to buying an expensive, noisy, plastic lightsaber. Of course when my eight year old suggested we could make our own… well now that sounds like a fun project!

Morgan and I talked a lot about how we might make a lightsaber.

We wondered what could work for the light, what we could use for the tube, and how we’d make it ‘look cool’. We did some googling, we asked Dad for some technical advice and we gathered some supplies to try out our ideas.

We weren’t sure if our lightsabers would work, even as we were building them, but they turned out great so we thought we’d share them with you.

If your kids love Star Wars they might also like our build a droid printable, or this Star Wars science activity to build an Ewok catapult!

How to Make a Lightsaber!

These lightsabers are easy to make with materials you can find around the house or purchase easily. You don’t need any special skills to make a lightsaber that lights up!

It’s important to choose the brightest torch/flashlight you can get, so that it lights up the entire length of the lightsaber.
We found small, inexpensive, torches, with five super bright LED lights and a button on the end. They were the perfect size and brightness.

How to put your DIY Lightsaber Together.

Morgan and I came up with all kinds of wild ideas for how to make a coloured plastic tube for the lightsabers, most of which were either too expensive, or too impossible! In the end we decided to try laminating some coloured cellophane and it worked great!

Start by cutting a piece of cellophane to the size of two laminator pouches placed end to end. Then carefully place a pouch over the cellophane at one end, and at the other, so they overlap a little in the middle.

The cellophane is slippery so it’s a bit tricky, but you don’t need to be perfect. As long as the laminator pouches cover the cellophane and overlap a little around the edges and by a good centimetre in the middle, you can trim off any wonky bits later.

Carefully feed your overlapped pouches into the laminator and you’ll get one long piece of coloured plastic coming out the other side!

Roll the laminated sheet into a tube the same size as your torch and tape it together, then tape the tube to the torch.

The next challenge we encountered was the light escaping out the open end of the tube, but we fixed that with a very simple solution… Scrunch up a bit of left over cellophane and pop it into the open end of the tube to ‘seal’ it, then put some tape over the end.

Now you need to make your lightsaber look super cool by adding a custom designed handle!

Free Printable Lightsaber Handle Template

Once you’ve finished your handle design, wrap it around the torch and secure it with some tape, and you are ready for Jedi training!

Morgan and I were thrilled with how well our homemade lightsabers turned out. It was so great to see my boy come up with his own ideas, do some research, test out his theories and revise ideas that didn’t work.

Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker have been battling on and off at my house for the past few weeks and our homemade lightsabers are still going strong.

Will your lightsaber power the light or the dark side of the force?

If your kids love Star Wars, or you are looking for a great Star Wars party activity, or a fun activity for May 4th, check out our Build a Droid free printables.