All photos: Gregory McDonald

If you have a Coleman military-spec lantern and are looking for a case to house it, my friend Greg has a solution. He takes it from here.

Sometime ago, I lucked upon an old army lantern, which I childishly coined as “The Lieutenant”; aka, “Lieutenant Lantern”; aka, the “LT”.

Tiring of the fleece blanket wrap to keep the “LT” from banging around in back of the truck during trips, I bought a black Coleman Lantern Carry Case.  Designed to fit Coleman’s current line of lanterns, specifically the 220, 290, 295 and 3000000946, the hard case comes as two pieces – a cover shell and a base.  The lantern slots tightly into the base, which has two tabs that the cover shell snaps onto.

Unfortunately, with the taller army lantern inside, the shell comes about an inch short of snapping onto the base tabs.  The MacGyver voice within, promising a solution, kept the case from being returned.  A few weeks of back burner mental engineering and a “I-wonder-what-to-do…” afternoon later, I took a ragtag team of tools and set to work.
The inner wall of the Case’s base held the lantern an inch above its lowest portion.  If I could get the lantern an inch deeper into the base, then the cover shell would reach the base tabs.  I sliced off the inner walls of the base, sparing the four protrusions that friction-held the lantern down.  In order to get the lantern deeper in, the protrusions had to be sliced once more, at the horizontal.  By chance, what was left on the bottom were four upright protrusions that would hold the inside lip of the lantern’s bottom while the upper protrusions, despite most of the inner structure sliced off, still had enough rigidity to friction-hold the lantern.  With the lantern now sitting deeper in the base, the cover shell slides completely over and low enough to snap onto the base tabs.  Challenge conquered!

Now I can use that fleece blanket to wrap the old Coleman stove.

More pictures after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »