Glowing Ball Issues

Okay, I've gotten all the pieces I need for my walking stick, and I've even made a prototype of the copper collar that goes around the top. I also rigged up a simple circuit for the light and checked it out. Here's my issue. The light I created is a very pretty blue LED powered by three AAA batteries in a little harness and turned on with a switch. Shining it through my contact juggling ball showed a problem, though. Because the ball I want to use is a perfect, clear sphere, it acts as a lens. The light doesn't get trapped inside the sphere, it moves through with remarkable efficiency. Really, the ball just focuses the beam of light on the ceiling and the ball appears to be glow to a very small extent. With a super-hyped up flashlight, there's a visible beam cutting through the ball, but that's it.

So, what to do? Any clear ball is going to have a similar problem, I fear. The clear ball will look neat, but it doesn't do the glowing thing very well. So I am presented with another option. Since I was into contact juggling for a time, I also have a semi-transparent white polypropylene ball I used for practice. It was pilfered for me by a friend of mine in college from one of those Ice Ball skee-ball machines. I can't condone thievery for the sake of hobbies, but what's done is done, and this ball has been my size tester for a while now. It's about 3" in diameter, and weighs a few ounces less than my acrylic ball. Great for practice, as it makes you have a lighter touch than the real acrylic ball. It also happens to look freaking awesome when you shine a flashlight into it. It glows very uniformly, being only a little brighter at the bottom (where the light is) than the top. The LED I have on my setup right now isn't strong enough to get this result, so I'd have to take a friend's suggestion and bury a mini-Maglite under the ball inside the handle. This gets me past the problem of not having enough power, for sure. With the Maglite under the ball, the thing actually glows brightly enough for it to be helpful when traversing darkened paths. So that's awesome. The downside is that I can't rig up an external switch on it (at least I don't know how to do so now) so I would have to turn the light on, drop it into the stick, put the top assembly on and just leave it on until the batteries die. I've got plenty of rechargeable batteries now, so that's not too big of a deal, but swapping the batteries would be at least a little bit of a pain. So that's the downside. I'm also not entirely comfy with the idea of drilling so far down into the handle. I'm digging the grooves pretty deep to get a good design on the wood, and I really don't want to drill out the side of this thing. I'll have to see if I can do this some way so I can feel comfortable with it. It may involve getting a longer copper collar and just housing the light mostly in that instead of in the wood.

My other option, one that just occurred to me last night, is to use a UV reactive acrylic ball and UV LEDs in the base. A UV reactive ball has a subtle, pretty glow under UV light. It would potentially look a little more ghostly and eerie, as the entire ball should be glowing pretty much consistently. My contact juggling ball is UV reactive, so I have a test subject at least. I'll go grab a UV LED tonight and slap it on my circuit to see how it works. I'll probably take pictures of the two options to see what looks better, and then post them on here.

I've also started a quick test for the copper and brass components of the collar and footing. I had polished the copper footing to a near-mirror finish and then watched it tarnish up very very quickly. That's not cool. So now I polished up my prototype collar and test-stained the wood, attached the collar with the brass rivets (not peened, just used as pins to hold the collar still) and then sprayed clear lacquer on the whole thing. I've gotten 3 good coats on it and have left it for almost a whole day now. I'm planning to leave it at least another day before I touch it at all. What I want is to see how effectively the clear coat stops tarnishing and maintains a pretty polished look, but I also don't want it to get smudgy and gross-looking or anything. We'll see how it all pans out, I guess.