At a local country show I found an army surplus stand selling brass cartridge cases and saw an opportunity to make Artyoms lighter for real.
There is some real world history to this style of lighter. Known as a Trench lighter, items like this were quite common amongst troops in the trenches of the first World War, and relates to a wider concept of "Trench Art".
The case, I'm not sure what it's from. It's approx .50" diameter at the neck, but has stamp "SB 13" It seems too short to be a standard .50 calibre round. |
So with the case sorted, the next things to consider are:
- Cap/means of extinguishing the flame
- Wick
- Fuelling & refuelling.
- Ignition
I wanted to keep the lid of the lighter as a bullet style like in the game, but firearms law and lead content make the idea of using a real one infeasible and undesirable.
Instead I opted to grind the end of a copper bar down to a bullet shape, and hollow the inside slightly to make a cap.
The rounded copper bar. |
Creating a hinge for the cap
The next stage is to create a hinge. A copper pipe clip was wrapped around the base of the cap, and secured with Araldite.
A second pipe clip was bent into a 'P' Shape and a bolt used to create the hinge (see gif below)
To attach this to the case, a brass olive from a pipe compression fitting (see pic.) was placed around the neck of the case, and the bottom half of the hinge was squeezed between it can the case to provide a frictional fit for now - it would later be further secured with epoxy.
Part two continues here
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