In the spirit of trying one new project per weekend, and because I took my last Airborne this AM, Andrew and I decided to make a flashlight (so that he can see pirates that are coming to kidnap him at night) out of a "superbright" white LED (Radio Shack, about $1.50), a  pushbutton switch that had been scavenged out of some electronics I recently threw out, 2 C cells, and a whole load of tinfoil.

The trick is to wire up the LED with the correct polarity. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that this particular LED doesn't require a resistor wired in (I like to figure this out by wiring it up without a resistor and waiting for it to "blow").

You'll need to shove a lot of tinfoil in there to make the contacts work with both ends of the two batteries which means you'll be better off running the wire on the outside of the tube (I like to justify this as an opportunity to give a lesson about how electrons flow but it was really just a design compromise).

The light ends up being super bright even without any kind of a reflector which I thought we would have to build out of tinfoil.

The other bonus is that the push button switch has to be pushed in for the light to stay on, a must of a flashlight made for a forgetful kid.