turpintine comes from pine sap.............

 

Is there a difference between rendered animal fat and used cooking oil(based on animal fat of course) Also remember if you use the wrong oil at and it's not burning at proper temp you get a lot of smoke.

 

Would those thick oils work their way up the wick? I used to use diesel because it was 3.00 a gal in Alaska, as opposed to ten a gal for kerosene. You have to clean the globes a lot more with diesel tho.

 

Olive oil has been used for centuries. Lehmann's sells simple lamps and a book about it.

 

i would use seal oil but i havent seen it for sale lately at home depot.....?...or sperm whale oil.

seriously thou, if you dont mind the stink...they have scented oil for those ladies oil candles at the dollar store sometimes in quart jugs. cant beat that for one dollar but you start smelling like a french whore after a few hours.

 

but you start smelling like a french whore after a few hours.

where's the problem with this? :

 

almost any fat and a wick will burn,,,the inuit use a stone with fat and a wick for cooking and heating,,,the easiest to use if you had to produce your own depends on where your at,,,i think candles would be easier if you had bees around,,

 

Wax myrtle trees make great candles as well. Just cook down the berries with water, let them cool, and skim the wax off the top. Add a wick to the wax, you made a candle.

 

If you use a new wick, you can burn alcohol in the lamp/ I don't know about the pressurized type of lantern, but I use alcohol in about half of my oil lamps. I collect oil lamps and found that the alcohol doesn't give off the smell that lamp oil does.

You can also use vegetable oil: olive, corn, etc. Again, I would use a new wick and make sure the oil container was cleaned before filling with a different type of oil.

 

Cool!
What type of alcohol do you use?
We have at least a couple dozen lamps.

 

You can burn nearly any fat and or oil. Pretty much any animal fat will smoke to some point. If you are doing a fat I think I would try and render it first to get most of the garbage and impurities out. I have a good stock of that kleen kero from Wmart. No scent no smoke in my lamps. It generally goes 1/2 price in the spring.

 

If you're using a thicker oil that doesn't want to burn well as is, try thinning it with a little paint thinner.

 

The prob with burning alcohol is it gives very little useable light. The purer it is, the less the light. It's one of the easiest bulk fuels there are to make, but it's just not a really good light source.

rich

 

That is when you contaminate the alcohol, it causes a yellow flame instead of blue. Food coloring tablets work very well.

 

I never knew that, LC! That is honestly the first time I have ever heard of that. I'm going to have to try that! Thank you!

rich

 

It is a little something I learned what I was trying to colored flames when I was a kid. Blue was a given, so I tried to make green with food coloring from Easter egg kits, but all I ever got was half blue half yellow and eventually mostly yellow. When I turned 18 I figured out green, but realized that it could poison.

 

Are you anywhere near any whales..?

I guess, in a pinch, fat chicks.

 

Has anybody tried mineral oil? Or baby oil? I know vaseline will burn in a cotton ball, can you thin that down with mineral spirits to make a lamp fuel? If so that might be a "stable" form of lamp fuel you can pick up cheap. $1 at the dollar store.

 

If that where to work it still wouldn't be cheap. You're not going to get a gallon for 4 or 5 bucks.

 

True, just trying to come up with alternatives.

 

PME (Palm Methal Ester) comes from Palm Trees and SME (Soy Methal ester) comes from Soy beans. Both of them would be perfect for lamp oil. They are alcohol based but if you mix them with a little bit of talo (animal fat) then you have a good mix.

 

I wonder if adding Polysorbate 60 and or Gum arabic to something like alcohol and rendered fat. PS60 is an emulsifier and the gum arabic would allow the mixtures to bind together and stay mixed. Both are pretty cheap. I'll have to do a little looking back into my chemisty lab notes because I used to use something that would make water dissolve into oil, and PS60 and GA were both used often. Guar gum may also help.

I know that using rendered animal fats smokes a lot but adding ethanol (denatured alcohol) to it might work well (adding the PS60, GA and GG). I wonder if using E85 would work well. 85% alcohol, 15% gas. That might take care of the "color" problem.

 

I use to add the inhibitor into the 99.8 pure ethanol shore tanks, tbo It's one of the dumbest things the govt does. They do this so people don't drink it. Not by spending more time educating the public, but by poisoning it. Meanwhile anyone who has the ability to draw some off the line, can do so regardless. SWIM (Someone who isn't me) always had to pull 6 Qt samples to run tests on in the lab, but SWIM always took 7 bottles. 1 QT of that stuff can knock your socks off for months... but that's just the word out there

I agree with the Alcohol/gas blend. When it comes to oil lamps, you gotta have a slightly dirty mix, much like Kerosene. A lot of people don't know this but Jet Fuel is a type of Kerosene. I use to run the Nasa contract (not naming the tank farm location) and they used the most baby blue Kerosene. If you left it in the sun for even a minute it would put it off spec and lead flakes would form at the bottom of the bottle. Fun stuff.

 

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