Rechargeable Wooden LED Collectable Display Stand

Recently my girlfriend and I had the opportunity to attend a glass blowing class. We were able to take molten glass from a 2000 degree furnace, colorize, bend, twist, cut, stab and mold it into nifty paperweights a bit bigger than a baseball. The class was super fun, highly recommended! The paperweights look great close up, but sitting on the shelf they seem a dark and plain. Time to make it glow! Time for another Instructable!

For this project I wanted to quickly create a pair of nice bases with LED lights shooting up to highlight cool features of our masterpieces. Ideally I wanted the lights to be cord free so they could easily live in a display case. I also wanted rechargeable lights to avoid battery replacement.

Here's the simple project I came up with, I hope you find it useful. This one takes minimal $$, tools and time.

Materials:

• Rechargeable LED light - I found a pack of 4 rechargeable LitezAll LED flashlights on sale for $8.99 - optionally you could use a battery powered flashlight and replace the batteries or find plenty of LED circuit Instructables, such as LED Cube Light.
• Base - with very little time before Valentine's day I figured I could repurpose something rather than make a new base. Luckily Hobby Lobby had two small wooden box styles that would do the trick. These are made by Woodpile and are also available at Michael's. I tried two different sizes and think the smaller while a tight fit, was better than the larger (plus it came with a hinge and magnetic clasp).
• Felt pads - optional

Tools:

• Small screwdriver/prybar to open flashlight
• Step Drill Bit or Hole Saw Kit
• Drill
• Sandpaper
• Hot Glue Gun
• Stain
• Paintbrush
• Steel Wool - optional to smooth the stained box.

• Pry - I assumed this might be tough, but really I just had to pry off the bottom of this flashlight using a small screwdriver, and then pull out the circuit board and a bit more prying for the light.
• Take Care - Be careful not to bend the light or break the wires.
• To Cut or Not to Cut? - This flashlight had 2 lights, a long one along the handle and a circular one at the end. I couldn't pry out the end and only needed the longer, brighter light anyway, so I simply cut the wires to smaller light.
• Set Things Up - Once you have the guts out of the light and have determined it works, you'll want to place things in the base of the box (note I'm using these boxes upside down), to be sure things all fit.

• Center - Find the center of the top of your box - this is trickier than you would think but there are some nifty Instructables for this, such as How to Find the Center of a Circle
• Drill - at first I used a step drill bit to make the hole and I think that would have been fine but I had a hole saw from a doorknob repair job and that made the hole bigger and the light brighter.
• Sand - a bit of sandpaper will make the hole smoother and take out any rough edges on the mostly pre-sanded wooden box.
• Mark - I also used a pencil from the top of the hole to mark the boundary of the base where the light guts go.
• Stain - since these boxes were unfinished I added a coat of light stain.

• Steel Wool - I used a chunk of steel wool to smooth out the stained box
• Hot Glue - Hot glue worked fine for placing the circuit on the base. It was a bit of a tight squeeze on the smaller box
• Magnet Clasp - The round box didn't have a magnetic clasp so I just hot glued some magnets to the edge of the base, though this is optional.
• Felt Pads - A nice touch so the base doesn't scratch your display shelf. Three instead of four seems odd by my friend insists this makes it less likely to wobble.

Future Topics?

• I was short on time for this project and it only took me two evenings, but given more time I could see extending the wires and exposing the charging port and button on the side of the box. I could even see adding a wireless card so the device could be turned on from the internet or Alexa.
• Thanks for looking, good luck on your projects!