Do you want a simple little oil lamp? A fat burning lamp like the one in the picture. Why is it called a fat burning lamp? Unlike regular candles, the fuel used in this little oil lamp is fat. In addition to butter, suet and other oils, the same oil used in the kitchen to cook sausage, bacon and other ingredients can be used to fuel this lamp. Read on with me if you are interested!
Step 1: Prepare the required materials
First of all, you need to prepare some wax that is very pliable. The easiest way to do this is for you to melt some of the most common candles you have on hand, and then mix the melted candles evenly with vegetable oil or petroleum jelly and set them aside. If you don't want to go to all that trouble, you can see if you have any cheeses in your kitchen that are packaged with red wax. The red wax on the outside of the cheese is an excellent material for making oil lamps. Because the wax used to wrap the cheese is very malleable, it can be easily molded into different shapes by simply heating it.
Secondly, you will also need something to shape the mold. Here, you can use plaster as a material for making molds. Of course, apart from plaster, if you also have terra cotta clay, it can also be an option. Anyway, the purpose of both materials is to surround the wax figure comprehensively.
Then, metal is also essential. You need to conceptualize the shape of the oil lamp you want and then come back with the corresponding amount of metal. This is because you need to cast the metal into a poorly readable size. The preparation of the metal is easy, you can prepare any metal as long as you are able to melt it. It can even be an iron storage jar if you want.
Finally, you will also need a container for melting the metal. You need to make sure that the melting point of this container is higher than the metal you are melting. Otherwise, there is a chance that the container with the metal has already started to melt while the metal inside hasn't changed at all. I suggest you prepare a small ceramic bowl, after all, this kind of thing is the best thing to find and has a high melting point. By the way, here you'd better find a pottery bowl as wide and flat as possible. This will reduce the time it takes to heat the metal and increase the efficiency.
Step 2: Make the wax shape
Wax shapes come in many different shapes, and you can make any shape you want. Of course, everyone's aesthetics are different. I will just briefly tell here how the wax shapes in the pictures are made.
First of all, take out the candle that we prepared in advance to heat it and ball it up into the shape of a ball. Then all you need to do is to take a pencil and pass it through this little ball of wax and keep rolling it until the ball of wax becomes a small cylinder. At this point, take out a knife and cut this cylinder neatly, then cut four slits from the outside in (being careful not to cut them off).
Remove the wax and pinch one end of it into the shape you want, here I did a petal shape. You can mold it into any other shape you want. The other end you hardly need to care about, just let him keep his original shape.
Take the wax you just cut off and pinch him into the shape of a circle, just large enough to be able to place inside the model you just made. The purpose of this ring is to subsequently place the wick. Finally, make four cylindrical bases out of the remaining material.
By the way, after making it you'd better place this wax shape in a slightly cooler place to prevent it from getting deformed due to the heat, so that everything we've done earlier will be undone.
Step 3: Prepare and make wax molds
Here you need to prepare a container for making the mold, this container should be big enough to be able to fit the wax shape made above into it completely preferably. Place the container in boiling water and add the wax shapes prepared in the previous step. The wax shapes will melt and stick to the bottom of the container. Then remove the whole container and let it cool down while the wax forms solidify. You can also place the whole container in the refrigerator for the next step.
The next thing you need to do is make the plaster. Perhaps when you purchased your plaster, the merchant sent you an instruction sheet to teach you how to make the right plaster solution. But if you don't have a finer measuring tool, you can totally throw away that instruction sheet and mix it as you feel like it. As long as the final state of the plaster you mix is thick, but still flowable it is a perfect state.
Once you have prepared the plaster, you can remove the wax form from inside the refrigerator. Pour the plaster slowly into the container. Here you need to be careful that you don't pour the plaster into the container all at once, but you need to stir it while pouring to get the air bubbles out of the plaster. Be careful not to stir the wax shape, otherwise it may become distorted. Remember here to always pour a sufficient amount of plaster, preferably one foot above the height of the wax shape.
Of course, if you don't want to go through all that trouble, you can buy a vacuuming machine. That way you can cut down on some of the time and effort. All you need to do is put a whole box of plaster into the vacuum machine, and the vacuum machine will help you pull the air out of the plaster.
Due to space constraints, up to this point, only half of the steps to make a complete oil lamp have been presented. In the next post, we will continue to introduce you to the subsequent steps. If you are interested, you must remember to pay more attention to the blogs we publish!
