Making a box for HEMA LED lights

This is going to be the lamest howto ever. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

The HEMA department store sells these pairs of red and white LED lights in the Netherlands. When it gets dark you see them everywhere, on dogs, joggers, police horses (whole bunches of them), and of course on bicycles. At 2.50 euro they are a steal (two leds, four batteries, buttons and straps).

I own a pair of these lights too, and they have one problem. They may be advertised to run 70 hours on the same pair of batteries, but in practice they run out much quicker than that, because it is extremely easy to turn them on accidentally. So you leave work, come home, stuff your lights in your coat pockets—and often even that is enough—put your gloves on top, accidentally turn on your LED lights and they will burn all night. Mine tend to run out after three week or so even though they should last me about three months.

HEMA doesn’t seem to sell containers to keep your HEMA lights in, and in lieu of retrofitting something else I took to simply adapting the largish packaging they arrive in. Although the end-result doesn’t stop the lights from switching on if you press hard on them, accidentally turning on the lights by just putting them in a coat pocket is now history. (I have had it happen that they switched on in their containers when I stuffed a hat in the same pocket, so my solution is not perfect.)

Look after the break for a short photo essay on how to do this.

You will need a pair of strong scissors or a knife, a stapler and possibly a destapler.

Cut off the top, making sure to leave some room above the bulges. I actually cut it a little too short here, make sure of a strip of about 5 mm above the bulges.

Remove the staples. I just tore the front and the back of the packing apart here, but you could also use a destapler.

Put a single staple to reattach the package. I put mine at the top, between the bulges.

Hey presto, you have a container that now fits in relatively small coat pockets.

(Google fu: doosje voor HEMA-lampjes.)

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2012 at 11:51 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.