Make your own: Glow Stickies

Glowstickies are very useful to locate things in the dark, if you can't get the ones filled with tritium that glow constantly for about 10 years you probably need a stick that is charged with light using glow in the dark materials (GID).

To make your own glow stickies you need a container, the GID material and some small splitring or something similar to provide an attachment point.

The case can be either a small acrilic tube that you can cut to the size you want, it can be a fuse or it can be the case of a mini chemical glowstick that is emptied after being used. For the GID material I use and recommend GID powder or Sand from Glowinc, the green powder/sand can glow for more than 12 hours after being charged with daylight for just 20 minutes and they are also charged with incandescent or flourescent artificial lights.

They have different colors with different afterglow times. You can either fill the stick with the raw powder or raw sand or use a mixture of clear Epoxy and GID powder, in that case make sure you saturate the epoxy as much as you can with the GID powder to have maximum brightness and runtime. To seal the ends if you use the raw powder or sand you can use crazy glue or similar.

A simple project to do and the materials are fun to use with no special tools required. Maybe you can give them a try. If you experiment with different media for the GID powder let me know.