DIY Dalek Ornament

Step 5: The LED Lighting

I decided to hack/ recycle some inexpensive lights we already had. The tealight body would be great, as it has a nice push-button switch on the bottom. It would be housed in the bottom of the Dalek. It's LED was flickering yellow, so I needed to swap it for a white one.

1. Cut out the top of the tealight, carefully.

2. Heat up the ol' solder iron and remove the LED and wires.

3.Open up the other small white LED and remove the bulb.

4. Solder the ends of the white LED bulb to two wires (recycled from an old phone cable). This will give enough length to connect the bulb to the tealight base that will be in the base of the Dalek.

5.Wrap the two LED legs with scotch tape (so that they won't touch each other and short out) and feed it through a rivet tube (remove the rivet nail and just use the tube).

6. I added a small black rubber grommet to the LED bulb, along with a white one (cut off the base of the white 'wick' from the original tealight LED. Gave the LED arm a Dalek-y look.

7. Feed the two wires through the hole and glue the arm to the head with epoxy.

8. Solder the two wires (now protruding from the base of the Dalek,  to the connections on the body of the tealight.