Over the weekend I went night fishing with my family. When you go night fishing you want to set up lanterns to attract bugs. The bugs attract small fish, the small fish attract bigger fish, and those fish attract even bigger fish (the ones you want to catch). So having a lantern is pretty important. My only problem is we only had one lantern, and when you’re fishing with four guys spread across a 16ft boat one lantern just doesn’t cut it! So I went and grabbed my favorite flashlight (a Stanley LED flashlight that has a tripod base) and made an attachment that turned it into a lantern.
Now I’ll say right up front that this lantern attachment was done in a hurry so it might not look the prettiest (you know, cause all of my other projects look really nice 😛 ). So to make the plastic housing that creates the lantern glow I used a small CD spool cover. Since the CD spool cover is clear it won’t make a good lantern housing so we need to modify it. What we want is a piece of plastic that you can’t see directly through, but the light will shine through (we want it translucent, not transparent). To make this clear plastic more opaque I took some sandpaper and really roughed up the outside and inside of the CD spool lid. Now when the light shines the whole plastic lid will ‘glow’ and not just let the light shine right out. After I ‘opaque-ified’ the plastic I cut a hole in the bottom for my flashlight to stick through. I made this hole just the right size so it hold itself on the flashlight by friction.
At this point I basically have a flashlight with an opaque plastic ring that slips on the top, but I don’t have a usable lantern yet because when I turn on the flashlight it just shines out the open top and gains me nothing. What I need now is a mirror on top that will reflect the light back down and out the sides. I could just put a flat mirror on top and it would work okay, but what would work best is if I had a 45 degree-ish mirror cone on top that directs the light out the sides. To make the mirror cone I cut out five circles of foam with each circle getting smaller and smaller. I stacked these foam circles on each other to make a rough shaped cone and the shoved a bamboo skewer through the center of the foam cone. I hot glued the bamboo skewer into place which also held the foam cone together. I then covered the cone with aluminium foil to act as the mirror. After trimming the aluminium foil and cutting the bamboo skewer to the right size, I stuck it into the CD spool lid so that the light from the flashlight will hit the cone right on the point and reflect onto the sides. I now have almost all of the light from the flashlight shining out the sides of the CD spool lid, but not all of it – some of the light is reflecting down and shining through the bottom. To fix this I traced the spool lid onto some more aluminium foil and cut it out. I then hot glued the aluminium foil circle on the bottom inside of the CD spool lid. This will reflect the light back to the reflective cone and that should reflect the light outwards.
When I finished it up I went into a dark room and tested it out. I was very impressed on how well it worked especially since it only took like a half hour to make. We brought it fishing and worked quite nicely for attracting bugs. This should work with any flashlight, but if you decide to make one you may need to make some type of stand if your flashlight doesn’t have a built-in tripod.
