For her first lightsaber, Tenel Ka carved intricate battle etchings into the hilt of her saber, one of two of the smaller teeth that once belonged to her great-grandmother Augwynne Djo's favorite rancor. She then applied a black paste made from dampened volcanic sand and polished the tooth until it brought out the carvings into sharp relief. The young Jedi apprentice used lava crystals that she later discovered to be flawed, producing a gray-white blade, that she had found in a local volcano lava tube. The hollow of the tooth was also a little too small for the crystal arrangement that she wanted, but having earlier learned that her friends were much further along in the construction of their lightsabers, this gave her a sense of urgency to complete her weapon and decided to go ahead and make do with what she had. Tenel Ka believed that any deficiencies in a weapon could be overcome by her skills as a warrior, not taking into account that a lightsaber is an energy weapon. The flawed crystals combined in an un-ideal arrangement resulted in a defective lightsaber.
During an ill-fated sparring exercise with her fellow apprentice Jacen Solo, her lightsaber's power source overloaded in the middle of an intense blade lock, and the blade disappeared. Focused on their sparring, the sudden loss of resistance took Solo completely by surprise. Unable to withdraw his lightsaber in time, he unintentionally severed Tenel Ka's left arm just above the elbow; the faulty lightsaber fell to the ground, exploding and destroyed the lost forearm with it, leaving nothing to be reattached.
Later, after recovering at Reef Fortress on Hapes and helping to foil an assassination attempt on herself and her paternal grandmother, Ta'a Chume—Queen Mother of the Hapes Consortium—Tenel Ka decided to continue her Jedi training and to rebuild her lightsaber. In an attempt to reconcile the best aspects of her mixed heritage, she used the second rancor tooth from Dathomir, a planet that was wild, untamed, fierce and proud (this time forgoing the battle etchings of the first one) and several Gallinorean rainbow gems picked out from the remains of the tiara of the Royal Princess of Hapes, her inheritance of regal bearing, refinement, power, wealth, and political shrewdness.