Oil Lantern

I'm back from the hospital where they've sewn my achilles tendon back together. I'll post about that experience another day. Meanwhile let's get back to business.

I found a piece of lantern wick in the shed and decided that making some kind of rustic lantern would be a good project for the weekend I went to Mark's wood. I thought it might raise the temperature in my tipi just a little.

When we were cutting wood for the fire, I selected the bottom of a piece of birch about 3 inches in depth and set about removing the bark and roughly shaping the outside with my leuku.

I knew it would be a huge task to carve out the bowl so I decided to burn it out. I scraped out a shallow dip in the top of the bowl to hold a couple of small coals from the fire and blew on them to get the desired heat to start the burning process.

After quite a while with little or no significant progress, Ben gave me the idea of using a plastic tube (from a biro) to direct the air flow. After adding more coals and holding the bowl in my hand, I realised that I could indeed direct the heat more efficiently. I later found that I could control the burning and thus the size and shape of the hole using this method.

Every now and then, I removed the coals and scraped away the excess charcoal and wood.

The process took quite a while. I suppose all in all it took about 3 hours to get to the depth I required. Once this had been achieved, I took out the spoon knife and scraped out the bowl. I then realised that the wood burning had left channels and fissures in the wood. I could scrape out the larger channels, but the fissures caused by the heat were another problem.

If I left them, the oil would just soak right into them and not provide any fuel for the lamp. I mixed some sawdust and ash with a little water and worked the mixture into the bowl. I tried to add some pine resin and charcoal but the cold air solidified the resin too quickly to spread in the bowl. I had to be content with adding a bit of walnut oil in order to try and seal the whole thing.

After leaving it to dry out, I soaked the wick in olive oil and added some olive oil in the bowl. The wick was held up by a couple of stones. The result was a pleasing pool of yellow light emanating from the bowl. The oil lasted a good while proving that my mixture of ash and sawdust had worked, but of course, this would need to be sealed properly back home.

It looked like the wick was burning down too fast until I realised that it had to almost rest on the reservoir of oil instead of standing up too proud. A few final adjustments and a rustic oil burner was glowing pleasantly in the tipi, perhaps not providing a great deal of actual heat but at least providing a cosy sensation of warmth.