A while back it occurred to me that there may be another way of doing a beeswax coated tallow candle, line the tin ( or back in the day, pewter) mould first.
So having a bit of time spare today I dug out the moulds and cleaned them up, set them up with modern cotton self consuming wicks and scraping together enough wax to do it used a double boiler to melt the wax I filled the two moulds.
After a few minutes I could see that the wax in contact with the tin had set so poured the molten cores back into the melting pot. I deliberately filled the second mould after a pause so when I poured them out there would be a distinct difference in thickness of set wax since I wnt to see if it will work with a thinner layer.
i set the moulds to cool while I got the mutton tallow ( the old stuff I previously made not the shiny new suet stuff ) melting in another double boiler.
When poured into the moulds the tallow it didn't seam to melt the beeswax shells much at all. As it cooled and shrank the level of tallow in the moulds dropped as usual but rather than top up with tallow I used a couple of teaspoons of bees wax, in the hope it will not mix with the tallow and form airtight seal.
I'll let them cool then freeze them to release them from the moulds and let you know if it worked at all. Hopefully this will be a improved way of making the wax coated tallow jobs, dipping was hit and miss, with the beeswax having a distinctly higher melting point than the tallow there was drips of tallow contaminating the vat of beeswax and the finished item was thicker than the moulded ones so don't fit into my various candle holders. You could get a smaller mould but I'm not going to.
ATB
ToTom
PS the rushes here were awful and unfortunately we had to dump the half decent ones we picked in Wales. Someone would have had them on their lap for 7 hours coming back and we had picked them over a week before so were well psat their best by then. So I didn't get to make any dips this year.
i did recently burn a couple that I made back in 2009 and although they had darkened in colour, stored in a tightly lidded tin, they didn't smell particularly stronger. It was hard to judge if they smoked much at all.