We happened to have a surplus clothes iron. In the past I had used it for making PCBs, but with the new printer that trick didn't work quite right any more. It seemed like such a waste to throw out a perfectly good iron. But what can you do with it?
A while later, while browsing the Hack42 website, I came across Aequitas' and Moem's Strijklicht. Now that is creative use of an old clothes iron, so my build is shamelessly copied from inspired by this hack. The word strijklicht is a play on words. The verb strijken means to iron clothes, licht means light. Combine those words and you get strijklicht which means something completely different; the light just skimming over a surface. One might call this a word hack.
When I opened up the clothes iron, I removed the water reservoir and heating element. Surprisingly it turned out not all holes in the sole were connected for steam. A considerable amount appears to be there for decoration only. The ones that were reachable from the inside were drilled out to fit 5 mm leds. To get some nice leds I ordered extra bright, warm white leds on Ebay. When I received those, the leds turned out to be almost yellow, but I didn't want to go through the order-wait-test cycle again, so I used them anyway. Under the temperature dial I fitted a PWM dimmer. Now you can dial in the brightness with the old knob. The spray nozzle, barely visible on top on the photo, holds another led. To power all this I managed to squeeze a compact 5 V wall wart in the space previously occupied by the water reservoir. Now this enlightened iron can even be powered via the original braided power cord.