Cool DIY Harry Potter Magical Wands
My daughter is going to flip when she sees this DIY Harry Potter magical wand. She wants a fancy wand for Christmas but I can’t come to terms to spend so much money on one. Also, Hermione is probably going to make an appearance at Halloween so this is perfect! Thanks to Instructables for this smart project.
Being Harry Potter fans, my kids wanted to have some wands of their own to play with.
There are some fantastic instructables for Harry Potter inspired wands on this site – some that light up and others that are intricately carved out of wood. But given my propensity for accidents using sharp knives, I thought wood carving was out of the question – I wanted to keep my fingers intact! Also, the kids requested a number of different wands in various styles. So, air-dry modeling clay seemed to be a good choice – it’s pretty inexpensive, easy to use and shape.
The budding wizards wanted wands that light up in appropriate colours for different spells, e.g. green for Avada Kedavra, red for Expelliarmus, etc. One way to do this is to use a single RGB LED with three switches that turned on the three colours. Using coin cell batteries instead of AA or AAA batteries would mean that the light would be fairly bright light without the wand being too big for my kids’ hands. I also wanted replaceable batteries for when the wand’s power was depleted after over-enthusiastic spell-casting. I attempted several prototype containers (made with card and other junk) for the batteries to be easily replaceable, but they weren’t were particularly good. Luckily, I found some keyring torches at a local store (for £1) that were fairly slim and could be unscrewed at the back. All I’d need to do was make it longer and cover it in clay to give it a ‘wandy’ makeover.
Most of the this instructable follows the making of an Elder Wand, but the same ideas can be used for other types and styles.
Materials
- stick or rod: I used a plant support cane for the length of the wand. Any thin and rigid material would do, e.g. wire from coat hanger
- air-drying modeling clay: for making it more wand-like. You don’t need much.
- battery holder: I used a small torch that could be unscrewed. Should be able to find similar keyring torches.
- RGB LED: I used a 5mm round head RGB LED (e.g. Amazon).
- 3 x pushbutton switches: I used 6x6x4mm 4pin DIP momentary pushbutton switch (e.g. Amazon)
- wire: long enough to cover 4x length of wand. I used 24/0.2mm equipment wire which I had lying around, cut into:
- 3 x short wires (~4cm) to go from the battery to the switches.
- 3 x long wires (~30cm) to go from switches to colour terminals of the LED, i.e. tip of the wand.
- 1 x longest wire (~35cm) to go from the battery to the common terminal of the LED.
Tools
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Paint: I used a mix of brown, white, yellow, and black acrylic paint, as well as a water-based varnish to seal and finish
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Hot glue gun: to hold it all together
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Pliers: for bending contacts on the switch, although you could do this with your fingernails too (if you haven’t bitten them off).
Images from Instructables.
For full instructions visit Instructables.
