Sparking Staff

In the Goblet of fire Viktor Krum enters Hogwarts with his comrades striking sparks from their wizards staffs, for this years halloween in the woods I decided to make my own version of the wizards staff.

The basics are that a metal file needs to rub on a lighter flint to throw sparks. There are no drawings for this as it is a total one off, made up as I went along.

The file is a round file of arond 12mm diameter, this has a brass piece silver soldered on the top end to allow for it to be located in a slot in the tube assembly. This 1/2" bore tube, as well as the slot down the side, has 3 holes for flints at the bottom end.

I had ordered some wire springs to hold down the flints but while I was waiting for them to arrive I used an o'ring around 3 pieces of 1mm steel strip to put the pressure on the flints then tried for sparks!

spark it up from Rog8811 on Vimeo.

From the video above it can be seen that I had to manually reset the device each time it was used, the next part was a self return spring.

As the spring is quite strong I had to add a piece of brass to the back of the file to get it to compress the spring but to be light enough for the spring to lift it again.

Once the proper springs for the flints arrived I fitted them, using a piece of tube to hold them in place.

I now needed to put an end stop on the device and fit it into a piece of tube.

The first picture shows the cam lock that holds it into the tube, when the screw is tightened it jams the device into the end of the tube. Three holes were drilled in the tube to allow the sparks to emerge.

I now had a longer thinner device.......

As the piece of steel tube was not very long I needed to add some length so I purchased a wooden broom handle. This was cut to length, shaved down at the end until it was a tight fit in the steel tube, It was held in place with a couple of countersunk wood screw.

Even in the dark it would look a bit odd being half wood and half metal.

I used sticky backed plastic to make it look right.

As it made a lot of noise when striking it on the ground I used a rubber door stop to give it a bit of bounce.This was attached with hot glue.

Just to finish it off I added a curtain pole end finial, this just screwed into the end of the wooden pole.

My camera is not the best but the following gives an idea of what it looks like in the dark.

sparking in the dark from Rog8811 on Vimeo.