To finish the head assembly, I need to modify the refill cap of the salt shaker to accommodate an optic.
This warranted a bit of snipping and sanding:
With the removal of the handle of the cap, I needed an alternative way to screw down the cap - so I drilled a couple holes to tighten it like a retaining ring!
And lastly, I put the optic into place and glued the edges with UV-activated glue. The optic rests a bit above the LED PCB inside, so the edges of the cap are what press down on the PCB rather than the lightly-glued optic.
And the head is complete! The inner diameter of the washer is just small enough to allow the lip (negative contact) of the driver to sit against it, meaning the electrical continuity of the head is also finished - no extra wiring needed!
So in a way, the light is now finished! But there’s a problem…
The ends fit together, the circuit is complete…but magnets alone don’t provide a reliable alignment of the head and tail. Something else needs to go in that gap to ensure the ends don’t slip laterally relative to each other.
I started by gluing the magnets into place on the head, to at least ensure they remained stationary:
But that wasn’t enough, so I got to brainstorming:
My plan is to add wood pieces on both the head and tail centered on the screws, that interlock together. This will prevent the ends from twisting and sliding!
So I got to work on a spare wood strip - sanding, cutting, and grinding it down:
After getting the wood pieces into the right shape, I secured them in place with Elmer’s glue - I never realized this, but it’s surprisingly strong for wood projects!
(You may also notice that one of the wood pieces had to be offset from the screw - the consequences of eyeballing where I added screws and not planning ahead…)
And the fit is just about as good as I could hope for! We’re in the home stretch now:
To polish things off, I rounded out the dowel that will serve as a button for the light:
And for a finishing touch, I used a wood stain marker to colour in the interlocking pieces and the dowel-button:
And it’s finally done!
Just in time to wrap up for the White Elephant gift exchange. My friends should get a real hoot out of this one!
Thank you for joining me on this journey!
It was a lot of fun going from half-baked idea to fully-functional flashlight, and this gave me lots of confidence to try more tinkering in the future.