Flashlight-saber

Ideation

When I was younger, I always liked playing around with flashlights. It was fun pretending they were lightsabers as I wooshed and zoomed around my house. However, flashlights hardly look like any Jedi or Sith's lightsaber.

In addition, most flashlights feature incredibly unwieldy grips. Although most affordable flashlights nowadays sport some kind of rubber grip, the flashlights I used as a kid were literally a solid tube of plastic with a switch.

Creating an ergonomic flashlight handle that resembled a lightsaber seemed like an excellent redesign for this project.

Prototyping

Once I determined the design I would pursue, I started on the physical prototype. To create the skeleton of the flashlight, I made a simple cylinder in Fusion, exported it to Slicer, then printed the cross-sectional pieces out of 1/8" inch cardboard. This skeleton was originally intended to be a test, but I couldn't access the 3D Printers in a quick enough time to match the pace of the project.

The cardboard pieces worked, but they kept falling apart. To hold the skeleton together, I wrapped the cylinder in duct-tape, then got to work applying clay.

I quickly found that my prototype was too thick for my liking. Unfortunately, I couldn't get back onto the printers to make another skeleton in time. Therefore, I tried to apply as little clay to the grip as possible, but this made it difficult to shape the handle appropriately.

This caused the most trouble when carving the contour lines. These were mainly for aesthetic purposes, but the lines on the lower half of the flashlight were also intended to signify an area where the user was supposed to grip the flashlight.

Since the layer of clay on the grip was very thin, these lines were unsightly. As a modification (and inspired by Chris D'Eramo's advice), instead of carving down into the clay, I decided to build these features out. I rolled out a few pieces of clay and laid them onto the grip so that my contour lines were now extruding from the surface.