How do you get a custom skin for a saber hilt to work?

if you have a model in mind that you would like to re-skin(that of course being the easiest way) you would simply replace the image file in the folder of the model you want to re-skin and give it the name of the image file you are to replacing....then the game unwittingly loads the new skin.....if you are wanting to add a new model to the selectable sabers, that's an entirely different story.....and i would suggest downloading More Hilts and studying what they have built/altered in order to get the new hilts to show up

You can use a current model and add a new saber by first creating a .skin file, it's plain text and basically looks something like this:w_blade,models/weapons2/saber_dual_1/dark_knightwhere the first bit (w_blade) is the name of the mesh of the saber hilt inside the md3 (it varies per saber [Thanx Raven!] and w_blade is for saber_dual_1),
the second bit is the path to the new texture/shader to use

Save this anywhere you want...but I recommend in the same folder as the saber you're making a new skin for (e.g models/weapons2/saber_dual_1/dark_knight.skin)

You then make a new .sab file, place it in ext_data\sabers and add this neato little line:customSkin "models/weapons2/saber_dual_1/dark_knight.skin"

There, you now have a new saber that doesn't replace the skin of any existing saber and doesn't require a new GLM :)