Welcome, welcome.
This tutorial was inspired by Masterjoe, who showed us how you can make your mechanical pencil just so much cooler.
That was a cool tutorial, but what about the pens? Well since you can't really make them any more functional, you gotta make them prettier. In this tutorial I will show you how to do that.
What you need
1.A pen like this one (it needs to be transparent!)
2.A soldering Iron and solder
3.a switch (unless you want your pen to constantly emit light) and an LED (light emitting diode), I used a blue one, the one pictured is red, however, because the blue ones have a white shell and are barely visible on a white background if you photograph them with a flash.
Oh, and a power input source (not pictured)
any will do
4.and a hot glue gun.
Step 1
Solder a wire to each contact of the LED. Make sure one wire is longer than the other (i forgot making one longer)
Also, make sure to remember which wire is soldered to the plus side of the LED. The longer leg of the diode is the + side
Your result should look like this.
Step 2
Then, remove most of the upper half of the pen (the part that is behind the rubber thingy)
This doesn't need to be sawed off or pretty, as the rubber thingy will hide it anyway. Now take the ink filled cartridge, and chop off most of it's bottom, in order for the LED to fit inside the pen.
Your result should look like this.
After doing that, cut a SMALL hole in the rubber thingy, so the cables can fit through. shove the LED + cables inside the lower half of the pen, then put the ink-cartridge in the upper half.
Your result should look like this.
Now put the ink-cartridge in the top half so that it sticks out so that you can write with it (since we chopped some of it off, the button won't work anymore)
With that being done, glue it in place with the hotglue. After that, glue it to the lower half (you need to glue it because we chopped the lower half of the upper half of the pen off, remember?)
Make sure the cable is in place and coming out of the hole in the rubber you cut before gluing it.
Your result should look like this.
Step 3
Take one of the wires, and solder it to one of the sides of the switch, I took the purple one (it doesn't matter which one, though), then solder anoter purple wire to the middle contact of the switch.
This picture might confuse you, because it looks like there's a lot more wires soldered to the switch than there are, here is a diagram:
Step 4
Wire the purple wire coming from the middle contact of the switch as well as the grey wire to the + and - contacts of a power source (Make sure to test them before soldering them. a diode will only let electricity through one way. so if you mess up, it won't work. The longer leg of a diode is the plus leg, the wire soldered to that should be wired to the plus contact, and the other one to the minus contact)
This is what the result should look like.
Step 5, final step
Use the hot glue gun to glue both the switch and the power connector on the pen
This is what the result should look like.
Aight. Connect it to your 3V power source, and there you go
ACTION SHOTS:
impress your classmates! (take an extension cord with you)
