PVC GI Angle Head LED Flashlight

This is my first instructable so please be patient, I recycled a LED circuit from a dead chinese mosquito zapper, and fitted it in a DIY GI anglehead flashlight out PVC fittings, piece of soft drink can and some acrylic plus copper wires and connectors. Flahslight uses 4 AA batteries for a total 6v resulting a pretty bright ilumination.

Materials

1 - PVC 90 degrees elbow 1-1/4"

1- PVC Female adapter 1-1/4"

1- PVC Male adapter 1-1/4"

1 - PVC coupling 1" (if you have a piece of 1-1/4" pipe laying around that would be better)

PVC Glue or Epoxy

Hot Silicon glue gun

Copper wire

Piece of aluminum from soft drink or beer can

Clear tape

Electrical tape

Copper shim

Acrylic 2.5mm thick

Rocker Switch (as small as possible so it can fit in the PVC angle)

2 - crimp female conectors

4 - Two-way terminal block conectors (in the pictures you will see 2 sizes but its better to use the smaller ones)

4 -AA Batteries

LED array from mosquito zapper

Cut open an empty and clean aluminum can from any beverage you fancy.

Since I am using 4 AA baterias, I will put 2 on the possitive side and 2 on the negative, so the length will be the length of approximately 4 inches. The width would be to be enough to roll around both lines of batteries so in this case would be aproximately 2 inches. For more technical data you can use duracell battery datasheet as reference: https://d2ei442zrkqy2u.cloudfront.net/wp-content/u...

Roll that aluminum with the batteries inside and use tape to close it and make a nice fit.

Afterwars cut a couple of aluminum strips where the terminals will be and tape it on the back of the aluminum roll.

Using copper wire make a coil and leave some wire uncoiled, make two of those and those will be the positive and negative terminals going to the circuit. Using hot silicon glue gun carefully glue on the aluminum tab you taped making sure the glue does not insulate the copper wire coil towards the battery. bend the remaining wire so the battery container looks like it has 2 antennas.

Please check with digital multimeter with continuity mode to verify it will make a good contact with the batteries.

I was so focused in this trial and error process that I forgot to take pictures so my apologies.

The battery container will go inside the Male PVC 1-1/4" fitting. So we need a cap that will also close the battery container circuit. We will get this from the female fitting, We need to cut it since we only need the threaded part. Some might say with a threaded pvc cap but usually those come with a curved side and we want our flashlight to be able to stand.

Once we cut the threaded part of the fitting we need to make a cap for it, in my case I used acrylic 2.5mm thick made a circle with the diameter of the fitting itself. Then made some 3 holes with my Dremel and screwed it to the PVC.

I experimented with a series of springs, metal washers, etc to close the battery container circuit but made closing the flashlight and closing the circuit a bit tricky. In the end a simple solution was to glue on the center of the acrylic a copper (or any conductor) shim.

I also marked the positive and negative orientation of the batteries so the user can place the battery correct order so the correct polarity of the LED circuit is mantained.

This Step might be optional, but leaving the PVC white colored seemed a bit boring.

Needless to say, to paint make sure you clean thoroughly all parts including sanding a bit the PVC fittings.

I happened to have red and black spray so got in street art mode and painted all PVC fittings.

Let them dry or else you may ruin the paint job with your fingers when handling before time.

For these steps im using wires from old PC PSU.

1- We need to solder wires on positive and negative terminals of the LED array we are using from the bug zapper.

Using Two-way electrical connectors we shall connect the wires that come from the LED array, leave one individual connector for each wire.

2- Solder female crimp connectors to electrical wires that will go to rocker switch. In my case Im using the positive lead from batteries to one switch terminal and from the other going to LED array.

3 - connect a Two-way connector to the battery container terminal.

4- Connect wire from negative battery container lead to connector going to negative wire from LED array

You can wire everything and test with Bench PSU and afterwards connected to the battery container using the AA batteries.

1- Introduce battery container to Male PVC fitting, use cardboard strips on the sides so the container stays in place.

2- Using epoxy for greater strength glue PVC 1" fitting on the other end of Male PVC fitting you just introduced the battey container

3- Make an acrylic stopper to size so the battery terminals stay put and glue on the other side of PVC fitting

4- Connect Two way connector to battery container leads and afterwards connect wires to the connector

5- Glue PVC angle preferibly with epoxy, I placed an epoxy layer cause the PVC fittings available to me were rather loose so in order to make it more sturdy. If in your case the fittings fit tightly then there should be no problem.

6- Pull out wires through rocker switch hole, connect to switch and insert in PVC angle

7- Connect positive wire from switch to connector going to positive wire in LED Array

8- Place and glue LED Array inside PVC angle, not too insde just enough so LEDs are inside the fitting

Now just add the batteries in the correct order, lock the cap, turn on the switch and they flashligh should be shining bright or else recheck battery order or wire connections.

I add a picture of a plant in my garden which I took in the pitch black of night with no flash on the camera