The Mary Rose style is an excellent choice for the 14th and 15th centuries, however, so with a little re-design I came up with this.
As you can see it uses the basic shape of the Mary Rose lantern, but the design has been super-simplified. The base and the top are made from 5" wooden plaque bases. The very top is made from a 4" plaque base. The top base was cut with a 3" disk cutter and the interior edges were sanded. The 3" disk was glued to the very top plaque base with wood glue. The vertical posts are 1/4" round dowel cut to 7 and 3/4" lengths. I sanded the ends (a little like shapening a pencil) to reduce their diameter. I used a drill press with a 1/4" bit to drill the holes. They go all the way through the bottom plaque and halfway through the top plaque. The dowels go into the holes in the bottom and go all the way through. Then I put a drop of wood glue in the top holes and the dowels go into those. The top plaque is prone to splitting at this point; be gentle. Wipe off excess wood glue. Turn the whole thing over and put some wood glue into the bottom holes and wipe off any excess. Let it dry overnight and you're good.
The central light column, in this case, is parchment paper (fake parchment paper). I cut it using a laser (because I have access to one) and put trefoil holes around it. I definitely recommend cutting quatrefoils, trefoils or some other pattern as it causes the light to cast these really cool light patterns on the ceiling. I wrapped the paper around the cutout disk glued to the top of the very top plaque, marked the join, and then glued the tube. I used a ruler and some weights to hold the two ends together for about 15 minutes. After that I used wood glue to attach the tube to the cutout disk. Best way to do this is turn the very top plaque upside down, put the tube in place, and then reach down with the wood glue to fill the gap between the tube and the cutout disk. Ten minutes drying time and it's safe to handle. Once it dries overnight you're done.
The taplight is a standard taplight using three LEDs. It works moderately well. It would work better with some sort of light diffuser. I'm experimenting. It doesn't cast a lot of light, but it definitely makes a dent in the darkness.
Future enhancements include: oiling the paper cylinder to increase translucency, some sort of light diffuser (a scratched up piece of clear plastic, an inverted reflective cone at the top of the lantern), cutting a 1" central hole through the very top plaque and the cutout disk, adding a handle, cutting a shallow depression slightly more than 3" in diameter in the bottom plaque, replacing the parchment (fake) cylinder with parchment/rawhide, replacing the parchment cylinder with glass (my wife found a really good and inexpensive way to do this).
The taplight cost $6, the parts for the lantern cost $10, it took me about six hours to make three of these while I was working out the bugs. And this lantern still has bugs as you can see from the photos. Lifting the light column rather than using a door that opens is obviously the most glaring departure from genuine medieval design and it actually reduces the utility of the lantern (many medieval lanterns are supposed to use the open door to cast light in a single direction) but the simplicity of the design really makes this accessible to anyone. I will be tweaking the design as I go to make it possible for people to put more labor and materials into the effort and more closely approach medieval examples. The door issue, for instance, is just waiting for me to find some workshop time to implement it.
I'm happy with the results thus far.
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