DIY With Dan : Explosions!

This is my take on the classic flickering tea light and spray painted cotton balls explosion if you haven't seen this it's a cool little thing that enhances any knocked out vehicle or helps set the look for an artillery bombardment.

Step 1: Gather your tools

You will need A flickering tea light, Super glue, a hard metal tool, black spray paint and either a bag of pre-coloured firey coloured wool (I got mine from Battlefront a while back) or some cotton balls.

Step 2: Test your flickering tea light 

YAY IT WORKS!

Remember these are mass produced made in China dollar store things so quality is not high on the agenda so test it first because we're about to rip into this.

Step 3: Remove the outer casing

With your hard metal tool (lol) wedge it between the casing where they meet at the bottom and pry the internals away from the housing. What you should be left with is the LED and the other useful components remember to also test it again at this stage.

Step 4: Paint it black

Now I covered the LED in tape as well as some other components and also tested it. It's very important as you do not want the original white housing to show through. Now that it still works let's move on to the final step.

Step 5: Making the Explosion

Make a small nest shape with the flame colours this will give some indication and reason for the light source I've superglued this nest down but next time I might use PVA as superglue is very runny and my fingers kept sticking to strands of wool.  

On top of the nest add some grey/black to make it look like smoke etc. You might want to try and bind the fire with the smoke just try and thread it in there. Tease the wool and to make it look more explosive or just subtle as mine's for a knocked out tank.

Results

In conclusion it takes about 15 minutes to build one of these and requires very little skill or effort however the changes I will make to the next one will be to use PVA glue and to cover more of the tea lights base but other that I'm very happy with the result. Try it yourself and see how easy it is.

Thanks

-Daniel