« Bercom’s Handy Paint Pail
Eastwood’s Tilt-A-Car »

How-To: Get Emergency Light from a Pencil

By Benjamen Johnson


Why carry an flashlight in your emergency car kit, when you have a pencil and some speaker wire?  If you haven’t already caught this how-to floating around the ‘net, check it out.  It’ll show you how to convert common graphite pencil lead into up to twenty minutes of light.


This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 10:04 am and is filed under How-To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “How-To: Get Emergency Light from a Pencil”

  1. eric Says:
    September 7th, 2007 at 11:04 am

    Cute hack, but not terribly practical IMO. You can only work one-handed now, otherwise you’ll burn something or short out the battery (ooh pretty sparks and burning wire!)

  2. Crusty Justy Says:
    September 8th, 2007 at 10:46 am

    I would think that if you HAVE a working car battery and wire, you can probably find something more practical, like say oh a light bulb! just twist one out of a socket and you’re good to go, because if you have enough light to actually split a pencil, then you have enough light to find a bulb….dont you think?

  3. Daniel Rutter Says:
    September 8th, 2007 at 2:08 pm

    I agree that it’s somewhere between silly and moronic to use a pencil lead in this situation, when you can probably get your hands on a perfectly good interior-light bulb without even unbuckling your seat belt :-) .

    Speaker wire will also get hot if it’s feeding a white-hot normal-thickness pencil lead.

    I think this is also less likely to work for long with common hard pencils, since they have a higher ratio of clay to graphite in their leads.

    I’ve only ever made about ten glowing pencils in my life so far, though (plus a larger number of propelling-pencil leads…), so I can’t say I’ve done an exhaustive survey :-) .

  4. Jay C Says:
    September 18th, 2007 at 11:10 pm

    it a great demostration of what you can do in a pinch. good reference.
    this method is used in a large scale for melting steel and other metals.
    great idea and use on a small scale.
    thanks

  5. hmmmmm Says:
    September 30th, 2007 at 6:48 am

    well I just carry a 9 volt battery and steel wool. Short the steel wool on the battery and then i put it in the fuel cell then there is all kinds of light.

Leave a Reply