Tips for getting transparent orange builds to actually glow

I did a similar build last fall but went the other direction on the blade. Instead of plates I used a row of those 1x2 clear orange tiles over a white plate spine, and honestly the tiles gave me a cleaner edge than plates did because there's no gap between studs showing thru. The teeth were the hard part. I tried clips first and they looked like a smile with missing teeth, so I ended up using small gold bar pieces on hinge plates and angling each one slightly. Took three evenings to get them even.

Where I'd push back a little is on the lighting. I never got around to LEDs and mine still reads fine in daylight, but it goes completley flat at night in a dim room. So if anyone is skipping the light strip to save money, just know the piece basicly becomes seasonal decor depending on where the lamp is.

One thing that helped me was building the whole blade, then holding it up to a window before attaching anything. Translucent orange hides seams pretty well when backlit, and I found two plates that had a stress crack from being secondhand only because the light was shining straight through them.

Also a note on the sanding advice, that tracks with what I saw on my one printed attempt. Mine went straight to the display shelf with the layer lines showing and it looks fuzzy compared to the brick sections next to it.

Agreed on checking seams against a window, that trick saved me too. I had a batch of secondhand clear orange bricks and two of them turned out to have stress cracks near the studs that were completely invisible til I backlit the whole run on my kitchen window. Mine were hairline cracks right at the base and you could see them light up like tiny lightning bolts. Also seconding the white backing thing, I tried a dark gray spine on my first go and the blade looked muddy from across the room. Swapped to white and it basically doubled how bright the orange read.

I only got as far as making a tiny one for my minifigure guy to hold, so seeing all this talk about lights and sanding is a bit much for me. Mine is just a handful of the see-through orange bits and the handle is a brown stick piece, and honestly it allready looks better than the first one I made where I used a normal red one and painted over it. The paint flaked off in a week. The printer part sounds fun but I don't own one, is there any way to get that smooth glowy look using only regular bricks?

One thing I ran into with my build that fits the pedantic end of this discussion is tint matching between part eras. I mixed some older clear orange bricks from the early 2000s with brand new ones, and once the whole blade was backlit you could see a faint banding where the older plastic reads slightly more yellow, probaly from the batch or just age. In normal room light you woud never spot it, but hold a lamp behind the finished thing and the seams between generations show up like tide marks. Now I sort my clear orange by rough age before I stack anything in a lit section, which is overkill but it works.

Update: tried the tiles-over-spine idea someone mentioned and yeah, way cleaner edge than my plate stack. Rebuilt half the blade that way. Now I'm wondering about the tint matching thing with older parts, since half my clear orange came from a mixed lot. Has anyone acutally matched old and new pieces, or is the banding just something you live with once it's backlit?