Thursday, November 20, 2008
oil candle
here is my oil lamp when it is running,
the advantage to this lamp is that it has the
same brightness no matter what the oil level is,
the level is low in this picture,
but you can fill it nearly to the top.
here is another picture, but it is missing its wick
so that you can see the stainless steel screen on the top,
the stainless steel screen is there to protect the
paper towel that is inside the copper tube.
there are slots in the sides of the tube at the bottom
to let the oil into the tube, they were cut with a hack saw
before the tube was welded in place,
but you can't really see them in my pictures.
here is the wick and stainless screen removed,
it is a very old wick and needs replaced.
the new wick is a piece of paper towel that is the
size of a business card and folded to fit in the tube.
here is a new wick installed with no screen yet
and the old wick mostly unfolded in the background.
here it is with the screen installed
and a new wick ready to be lit !
the wick is the cotton end from
a q-tip that has been pulled off.
pour oil on the wick before lighting it.
if you are lighting it with a match,
you will likely need to replace it
every time that you light it as
it is hard to light after it has been used,
but if you have a small torch,
you can light the wick easy and it
will last a month of regular use.
who would have thought that it would have a
label on it after all of the years that I have had it ?
it gets hot in use, so I put it on a metal dish when running.
so other details on it,
the inside of the small tube is about 0.3 inches (8mm) inside diameter, and 0.37 inches outside dia.
the copper end cap is almost 1.3 inches tall, and
1.75 inched diameter.
the stainless screen is very fine, and is the kind that someone would use in a smoking pipe, and smoke shops sell them although you have to trim it to fit the tube.
when I started making them, I had no welder, so I cut the bottom of the small copper tube into 4 sections and spread them out so that so that the tube would stand up in the cap.
they seem to work well mo mater what oil that I put in it,
it burns rancid oil just fine....
the paper towel in the tube will clog up if you use things like extra virgin olive oil that has more solids in it, so run the cheep oil, I have corn oil in mine right now.
I hope you like the information,
and feel free to leave a comment if you want more info
or if you just want to say thanks,
or if you want to tell everyone how well it worked out.
anonymous comments are allowed.
