Rush dips

[tombear]

Another nice thing about those wax and sawdust fire log thingies is you can cut them up with a saw or better still a hot knife to make handy little fire lighters or as emergency fuel for a thermette or other volcano kettle. I must work out the weight need to boil a full kettle, which with my maths means trial and error. I suppose I could put a big chunk in of a known weight and extinguish it as soon as the water boils and weigh that for the differnence...

ATB

Tom

 

[Melonfish]

Got to say i missed this the first time round but i've been reading this morning and enjoying every bit, Tombear your write up is superb! and i'm totally fascinated!
i spotted your teddy day out post the other day dan and i was wondering what you got them for, must say i'm rather up for trying some of this myself, and rather excellently there's some rushes growing IN MY GARDEN! spotted them at the beggining of the year when i tidied up my garden (man did it need it) but since i've let the grass re-grow after re-seed and these rushes have shot up again (clay soil see) and i know my local brook is covered in em so i've got myself a new project, with the shed cleared out i can actually get in there to work to boot!
another bonus is there's a massive glut of reedmace on the brook this year and i'm tempted to try a couple for bowdrill/food/lighting now.

i'll document what i can and let you know how i get on but this looks like so much fun! next is to bug my butcher for some rendering

 

[tombear]

Cheers! Making them is a lot of fun.

The wooden nps are a doddle to make if you ain't into the metal working bit

http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=59265&pagenumber=

and it's really worth getting mutton or lamb fat over beef. The tallow you don't end up burning is good for a lot of other things.

ATB

Tom

 

[QDanT]

If your not into boiling up a dead sheep for tallow you can still buy it at good plumbers merchants.

I get mine at Merrit & Fryers in Skipton which is near the canal and the guy in the shop was saying that they always know when they've had Rats in the shop overnight,:yikes: as they always chew through the Tallow tubs and eat the contents. He also said they still sell a few tubs for lubricating sash window cords (it's grim up North)
and as a heads up on the firelogs they were in Nelson Morrisons today at £3.99 and Nelson Home Bargains :You_Rock_ at 99p, I got another x5
cheers all Danny

 

[QDanT]

As a follow on to posts #71 and 78 I went for some ordinary rushes, after a pm from Tombear :- dissapointing session dipping this years rushes. Even on a single dip the things are breaking under their own weight.
http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=59870
rushes picked last Tuesday south of Boulsworth hill Dove stone on horizon

cut to length

soaked for 5 days

peeled next to the peelings this afternoon

drying on the stove tonight

no problems and they seem firm enough, I'll get the "grisset" out in the week and have a tallow/beeswax dipping session

cheers all Danny

 

[tombear]

Hi Folks
I couldn't find any rushes worth making into dips this year but I have been lucky enough to find a friendly butcher who is happy to save me the excess fat from the lambs he gets in. I had the first 4 lb 6 oz of raw fat and what have you earlier this week and after 3 boilings with salt and a final strain through some kitchen paper made

2 lb 11 oz of very white tallow. I should now have a steady supply of the stuff and am waiting on a tin candle mould from my tinsmith friends over in the US before I start making some flax wicked 2oz candles.

On the net I have read repeatedly that the qualities of the tallow can vary according to when the animal was killed and what it was fed on but so far can't find any further details. I'd especially like to know how to get the hardest tallow.

Incidentally the leather polish i made with the mutton tallow, neetsfoot oil and beeswax still hasn't gone off so it looks like the pine resin I added works stopping the bugs growing.

ATB

Tom

 

[tombear]

Went into the butchers for a couple of pounds of their excellent Cumberland sausages and came out with a free bag of 11 lb of lamb fat.

I've chopped it up and boiled it with a table spoon of salt for every pound. After 3 hours I strained it, put the clear liquid to cool, put the solid matter back into the cauldron and blitzed it with a hand blender, added a few kettles full of boiling water, more salt and boiled it for another couple of hours and have the second pressing cooling. Tomorrow I'll wash off whatever has seperated out and boil it up again in clean salt water and filter it through kitchen paper in a sieze. Last time I got a lot out of the second boiling.

If I had time and wasn't threatened with mutilation for doing it in the kitchen (it was blowing a gale!) I would have boiled it for a lot longer.

The kitchen paper is very good at filtering out the blitzed of meat and gristle.

I should be getting my 6.25" candle molds in a week or so.

ATB

Tom

 

[tombear]

in the end I got 5 lb 6 oz of very white, hard tallow from it and a lot of overcooked dead sheep. From doing a bit of research (I'm trying to make them correct to th mid 18th C for my own dubious reasons) for "best" tallow candles I need to use equal parts of beef and mutton tallow and one of the numerous receipts for making the finished candles hard and less prone to melting involves adding one ounce of alum for every pound of fat. Herself says theres some alum in the house but if I have lost it you can get it from Indian supermarkets as turti/sphatika for a lot less tan Boots sell it for.

So I've bought two pounds of best beef dripping and once the tin moulds arrived and herself has spun me some flax wick I will make up 2 dozen 2 oz candles, or as many as 3lb of tallow will do as until the molds arrived I won't know exactly how many I will get. Some I will try and make with rush wicks.

ATB

Tom

 

[tombear]

Well that was different, I melted the beef and mutton tallow on a low heat and added 3 oz of alum, which despite stiring would not disolve, insted it went green and gloopy and has stained the bottom of the stainless steel pan black.

I filtered the molten tallow through some kitchen paper and it seams to be OK, I was worried it would get a green tinge. Tomorrow i will see if its set any harder.

Perhaps the allum was added with all the boiling water at the start of the rendering process insted of the salt? The texts don't say so but I will give it a try next time.

ATB

Tom

 

[tombear]

After a unavoidable delay my candle moulds have arrived from my tinsmith friends in the States.

I am absolutely chuffed to bits with them and once I have drilled a couple of holes in a block of wood to make a stand I will be having a go. Due to the hard work of another I have a large supply of twisted flax wick and plenty of raw beeswax and tallow.

Incidentally the tin back right is a dedicated charcloth making tin they did for me after I'd seen pics of one they did for someone else. I'd got sick of seams melting and lids blowing off in an unpredictable manner if the hole gets blocked. This design is entirely of folded seams and the lid can only go straight up! Having had a treacle tin lid fly past my ear at mach 2 once I can live without that! Its sized to fit inside my big mug. I've plenty of 100% flax scraps put by so when we get a dry night I will give it a go.

ATB

Tom

 

[tombear]

I've been doing a bit of candle making, done a dozen with raw beeswax and 3mm flax wick treated with turpentine, about 2 dozen 50/50 mutton and beef tallow with a few candle stubs thrown in with plain flax wick and have started on a dozen with the turps treated wicks, 2 parts mutton, 2 parts beef and one part rosin in the hope of making something more tolerant to heat than a straight tallow job.

I've tested the first of the rosin ones and it burns very well so Id like to do more but with less processed resin, ie some thats been collected so does any one have any spare to trade or sell please. What little we collected in the summer has been used up and to be honest i've never had much joy collecting the stuff.

If anyone has any advice on the hardening of tallow (the period methods often refer to chemicals I'd rather not play with) I'd be grateful to hear about it

 

[tombear]

The kids are off with coughs so I've been in all day and did some experimenting with dipping tallow moulded candles in beeswax to make them survive heat better. Heres my conclusions

Chill the tallow candles in the freezer for at least a hour or the heat of dipping causes some melting that leaks through the wax coating.

Let the beeswax cool until it is at the point of hardening on the sides of the container. I uses a double boiler from a charity shop.

Only one or two quick dips are required. Allow the wax to cool between the dips as the beeswax will shrink and the tallow expand as it warms up again and a longitudanal crack will apear, about half a mill to a mill wide. A second dip fills any cracks but does thicken the candle so it may not fit in a holder that the mould goes with, if you got the latter to go with the former.

In future I will live with the cracks as they are very small and two dips more than doubles the wax used per candle, which is the expensive ingrediant.

This candle was dipped 4 times and the coating is far thicker than it needs to be, it is also more than a inch diameter.

The dipped candles do burn more slowly than the straight tallow ones and handle as well as a all wax candle, a twice dipped candle effectively seals in the tallow and so they will store longer before going rancid, like a wax covered dutch cheese!

The tallow candle I have had out in a centrally heated room is becoming harder over time and has not melted, much to my suprise, the same goes for the one with 20 % resin, which is even harder.

Two tallow candles posted to someone in Sctland survived intact so they are resonably transportable.

ATB

Tom

 

[tombear]

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.

 

[tombear]

After a night in the freezer box one candle had stuck fast and the second after coming out about a inch when the wick broke. I had to resort to the pouring boiling water over the mould trick, while holding the lot over a sink of very cold water. On hitting the water the wax instantly solidifies so you get least distortion and loss of materials. I suspect I hadn't dried out the moulds properly after cleaning them so ice glued them into place while they were shrinking in the freezer.

Unfortunately the wicks got wet so I've now left them to dry, the one ill keep to see how well it store I will seal the dried wick in wax. The other I will test tonight. No tallow is visible and to all the world they look like old beeswax candles.

Given allowance for my own cack handiness I consider this is a viable method of improving tallow candles. The skill will be in imparting the thinnest coating of beeswax that does the job. I have used the darkest beeswax I had access to so that the contrast ( i could have melted down some chemically whitened bees wax candles ) with the tallow will be easy to see once they are burning down but if you used beeswax that had been fully sun bleached and the best processed clean white tallow there would be hardly any difference in colour. I'm now wondering that in the historical context if these wax coated candles were used to con the buyer into thinking expensive solid beeswax ones were being provided or as a budget ostentatious show in a great house or Abbey?

atb

Tom

 

[British Red]

Count me fascinated and reading.....

 

[tombear]

Cheers!

just tested one of them. The wax is thicker than it need to be , but that's easily sorted by pouring out the molten wax quicker next time. Unfortunately the iPad camera sucks at taking pics of lit candles in the dark and for some reason its not letting me sign into photobucket on the real computer to up whatsit the pics taken with a real camera.

Anyroad the wax coated candle doesn't drip any worse than a solid wax in a draught and I timed the burn rate between two marks and it came out at 57.5 minutes per inch which is not bad at all.

For summer use or to increase shelf life coating the tallow in beeswax is a useful method.

ATB

Tom

 

[British Red]

Fascinating

How do burn rate and light compare to solid beeswax?

 

[tombear]

Ill see if I can find a all wax one with the same wick and do a burn test tonight. Light wise I'd need to get a light meter to tell the differance. I couldn't tell any difference with my naked eye/ memory. When extinguished there wasn't much smoke, none when pinched out. To be honest even a modern Parrafin candle smokes a bit when blown out.

ATB

Tom

 

[tombear]

After a year off from making any we picked the best of a poor lot of common rushes from the park out front yesterday and left them to soak overnight in cold water. They are pretty spindly things and on closer examination I don't think a 10 th of them were worth peeling but the middle son and I did do so and here's what's on my bench in front of the window drying out.

I'll leave them a few days and then dig out the proper mutton suet tallow I made a couple of years back and dip them. They are soooo spindly I may have to resort to double dipping this time.

Has anyone seen nice big fat ones this year as this is the second year they have been rubbish round here.

ATB

Tom

 

[tombear]

One more thing, the big saw blade soaker I knocked up was just the job for storing the wet rushes while we processed them.

You can see how many we started off with just to get a few hundred good ones.

ATB

Tom