What does a lightsaber actually look like on the inside? Until 1998, that was pure speculation. Then came the Star Wars Visual Dictionary , officially showing for the first time what the inside of the hilt is supposed to look like. So for the first time you could see a kyber crystal, a power cell and a focusing lens.
The man behind this illustration is Don Bies, former model supervisor at ILM and later archivist at Lucasfilm. In 1997, author David West Reynolds approached him, provided a sketch and commissioned him to physically build the internals. Not as a concept drawing, but as a real cutaway model, which was then photographed for the book.
Don Bies turned the brass parts himself on the lathe, laser-cut the internal structure, got real crystals from a lapidary in Petaluma and even made casts of original archive lightsabers.
In an episode of Adam Savage’s Tested , Don Bies brings this prop along. In the entertaining 20-minute video you can see what the very first official lightsaber cross-section model really looks like and where each part comes from, with lots of great details.
By the way: David West Reynolds was a guest at Noris Force Con in Nuremberg last year, where Tim got to interview him on a panel. He had the sketch mentioned in the video with him in his presentation there.
