FLINT, MI--Adam Churchill has come a long way from the curling irons he used as a kid to recreate epic Star Wars battles.

Now 44, the Flint artist spends his days carefully recreating lightsabers using electrical equipment, metal parts, stones, crystals and other odds and ends scattered around a workshop he keeps crammed with boxes, tools and oddities.

The lightsabers are in different styles, but most are metal cylinders cut in different styles with knobs, switches and other decorative additions.

"I'm building this one out of anything scavenged I can find," he said, holding up a current work in progress. "I'll tinker with just about anything."

He got serious about his craft in the 1990s, after he bought a factory made replica lightsaber that he decided just "wasn't unique enough."

"I took it apart so that only I could turn it on," said Churchill, a religious man who initially set out making decorative metal crosses before moving into lightsabers.

He and some friends started making their own, and then he never stopped.

He said he estimates he's built well over a thousand of the Jedi light swords by now.

"I kept going," said Churchill, who used to sell his creations for $150 but now gives them out mainly as gifts. "Now I make the guts and all kinds of stuff."

As for the big question – do they work ? Well, no.

None of his creations shoot out beams of light capable of chopping off another Jedi’s hand -- an omission for which Churchill can explain with a a few scientific reasons and theories of why it's impossible to actually make a working lightsaber.

But Churchill said he said he's not as interested in the blades as he is the handles.

"I don't really care too much about (the blades)," he said.” It's what it stands for, for me. You were not allowed to be a Jedi unless you can build one. ... The act of just constructing it and building it, is the completed ritual for a Jedi master."

And does Churchill consider himself a Jedi?

When asked, he pulled out his phone and opened it, revealing a picture of himself wearing a pair of his work goggles and the words "Master Jedi Adam" across the screen.

"I do," he said.

S

cott Atkinson is an entertainment reporter for the Flint Journal and can be reached at (810) 262-0216 or at satkins1@mlive.com. You can also follow Scott on

or

.