Intro to Fabrication
February 2, 2022Week 1
Make a Flashlight.
Defined as:
1. Portable
2. Makes light
I mainly followed my desires for this project.
I had some clear vinyl tubing I wanted to play with.
I wanted to cut and drill some wood to refamiliarize myself with tools.
With these materials, I imagined I could make a flashlight with a slightly unconventional form. My initial idea was to make something that lights up the button that turns it on. Like a sort of ouroboros.
Raw materials:
I cut the length of wood with the jigsaw in the shop.
Drilled a hole halfway through for the tube with the hand drill.
Tricky part was figuring out how to drill a square hole.
Used a drill to slowly cut though the material.
(The blowout was fine because I had to make a larger hole on the other side, for holding the battery.)
Used the same method to make a larger square hole on the other side, but with the drill press to make sure I didn’t go all the way through.
Used the band sander to smooth out edges from cuts on the jigsaw.
Casing:
Wiring:
Cut solid core wire to match the length of the vinyl tubing.
Soldered the LEDs to the wires + heatshrink to make sure the two wires don’t touch:
I had to figure out how to solder solid coil wire to a ‘male’ header. I supposed that I could probably just solder them in contact next to each other, but looked it up to make sure.
It worked! But then I realized I had soldered it before threading the wires through the hole. So then I desoldered and resoldered.
