Thread: Flame Light's

Tweet

Hi Everyone,

I was wondering if anyone knows how to build a flame light with silk, a fan, and led's? I would like to build one that is battery powered. I have found plenty of sites to buy from and a few to build with electric. Any help would be appreciated.

Don't think it would be a far stretch to look at the electric ones and substitue battery components from... flame lights have a very basic principle... powerful enough fan to move the silk... if your fan isn't powerful enough, build a directing shroud in order to direct the air up through the silk... finding your fan is the hardest part, then finding the right light weight material... as far as the led's go, use the same principle... either hack an existing item or build your own circuit...
Hope this helps

Thanks for your suggestions. I think that is what I will end up doing (buying electric and converting). I talked to my husband and he agreed to look at it for me. Thanks again. I will let you know if it works

I have done this before but on a much larger scale. You can pick up the silk like material from any fabric store or maybe even walmart. I would try walmart first cause they will me much cheaper. I think I paid less than $4 for a yard of white translucent silk like material. It needs to be very thin and very light. The fan is the only trouble if you want to run off of batteries. You need to figure out what type of batteries you are going to have room for. I would try and go C size if you can so that you don't have to change the batteries every couple of hours. Fans will drain batteries pretty quickly. The best thing you can do to try and duplicate something is just look at the orignal. Pay attention to the size and shape of the silk flame. Feel how much wind is coming out of the fan. That will give you a good idea of how much air is going to be needed to move the silk. What kind of batteries are they using and espically the number of batteries so you can find out the voltage (1.5v each for AA, C, D / 1.2 for AAA / and 9v battery). When you find that out look on the box for the electrical draw IE: 30 ma that will tell you how powerfull the fan is minus the leds at 25ma each. A computer fan draws 0.07A (1 ampere = 1 000 milliamperes). Then google electronic surplus. You will want to look at places like electronic goldmine, mpja, surplus electronics, ect. They should have what you need. For leds I would get them from besthongkong from the ebay stores. They are the cheapest for ultrabright leds. You should be able to get 100 8mm leds for $5 plus 8 ship or you can pay $1.50 each in radio shack for ones that are 1/5 as bright. Hope that helps.

I'm working on some homebuilts right now and have to admit, they take a fair bit of tinkering to get them to work right. Given we are getting pretty close to the big day, I would agree you may be better off to hack some existing ones rather than going for scratch built at this point.

Don

Yeah and it will be tough to make them for less than what they are charging for. I could probly make one for (assuming you had to buy everything and for most of this you would have enough left over for 10 of them as opposed to just one)

Leds = $5 - $8 (assuming you buy like 30 with ship or you buy 4 from radio shack)
silk material = $3 -$5 for a yard
small caldren = $1 - $2 (dollar store might have this or walmart)
fan = $1 - $5 (depends on size and where you get it)
on / off switch $1 - $3
wire = free ( should be able to find a few pieces of spare thin electrical wire from something)
resistors for the leds = $1-$3
varible resistor (trimmer pot) for fan = $1 - $3
spray paint red for the flames and black for everything else (optional)
battery holder = $1 -$3

and about 2 - 4 hours of labor depending on how well you know how to make stuff. This is only a good thing if you want to make like 10 or 20 of them. If you only need 2 or 3 then I would just buy them. I am sure you can find them for less than $15 each.

Thank you so much Distorted Designs and Ruetten for all of your suggestions. I really appreciate your thoughts on this.

My husband has been so busy with work the last couple of weeks, so he has been unable to help me with this. So I think I'm going to start buying supplies little by little and he should be able to help me after halloween No worries I should have something really cool for next year. I'm really excited to make some cool stuff. If we can figure out how to do this I will post on the tutorial section on how we did it. I might just go with the electric, but I'm still going to try batteries first. Thanks again for your help and I will let you know how it works out. Halloween is near!!!

Chris

Try this youtube video it is a possibility
Or do a search for vulcan flame on youtube