Lifesize Lego Camping Lantern

This is a kit to build a working lego styled lantern, loosely based on the old Coleman lantern designs I remember from my youth. Originally made for my young nephews, so it's perhaps a little smaller than the originals but should be easily scaled up. Could also be used to build a few other things, if you feel ambitious.

The intended use for my build was to have a AAA mini-maglite provide the lighting. These flashlights have a “candle mode” feature where you unscrew the lens at the far end and expose the LED to illuminate everything in the area and blind any unwary onlookers who make the mistake of looking straight into the light source. You don't have that problem here, fortunately. It's designed with a gap running through the middle of the lantern that's just large enough to hold the maglite and let some air circulate so that it won't melt. To build this configuration you'll need one of each part included here. The 2x2 cylinder needs to be printed in a transparent or translucent filament, as it serves as the lens for the lantern, but all the other parts should be printed in an opaque filament (ideally either forest green or red, if you want to stick to the original color palates.) I highly recommend PETG, as the added strength and heat resistance will greatly extend the lifespan of this thing (particularly the friction fit parts). 

Instructions are included detailing how to build the lantern, but I imagine that most should be able to work it out without them. Key thing to keep in mind is that you need to be sure you use the solid 2x2 plate on the bottom if you want to use a maglite in it, as otherwise it'll slip right through the bottom. But one of the things I like about this design is that there's plenty of space to install alternative solutions for lighting, so if you want to use the gap to run cables (or are simply determined to stick to actual Lego part designs) you can. Just keep in mind that apart from the few pieces that are designed to be easily removed (the lens and bottom plate) tolerances are razor-thin by design. They'll go together easily enough, but probably won't come apart again without a heat gun.

As a final note these were all modeled to be scaled up from real Lego parts by a factor of five, but I did make some minor tweaks here and there to improve the fit and produce the look I wanted. Most of the time this was really minor, like making small adjustments to stud placement and size to change the level of friction they'd generate. But the 2x2 straight cylinder is a lot taller than the standard Lego dimensions. So if you want to use these parts in other huge Lego builds and need to adjust them to fit with other parts, keep that in mind.