Hey all! It has been way too long since I posted here. I got into my new house a while back and haven't had the time or space to do much of anything since then. I did decide to try something pretty fun last night, so I thought I'd do a writeup for you all.
Start with a tin. This one is 3" in diameter and maybe 1.25-1.5" tall. The size honestly doesn't make much of a difference. The box of Spree in the background is optional.
Get a piece of cardboard. This is just an example, as the piece I ended up using was something like 7 feet long. Try to get it cut at an even width all the way along the length. Making a mark or something would be much easier. If you don't do this now, you'll have to do it later and that's a big pain. I'd make it so that the edge of the cardboard sits maybe 1/8" below the rim of the tin if I had it to do over again.
Tear off one side of the cardboard. What this does is to give you a piece of paper with the corrugations attached. When you roll it up, you'll have little pockets between the layers, which will hold the wax, sort of like a honeycomb. I don't know for sure that leaving the side on there would ruin the stove, but I didn't want to experiment with this one.
There you go. Roll it up and stuff it in there. You want it to be snug, but you don't want to ruin your structure to fit it inside.
Melt your paraffin wax on your stove. I have a dedicated pot I got from Ross for $3 and it works well for me.
I put foil over a cookie sheet to use as a pouring platform.
I also have a muffin tin for the extra wax. Thankfully, the previous owners of our house left some nasty old muffin tins in the base of the stove they had torn the door off of and left for us. So now they're my craft tins.
Pour the wax into the tin. I didn't have it all melted first, but that's fine. It will go in and fill up the tin pretty well, and it will soak into the cardboard. You may have to go back in a bit and fill it up the rest of the way. Just try to make sure you have the surface of the cardboard all pretty well covered. You'll have to burn some of it off, but you don't want to have just bare cardboard on here or it'll burn right off and give you gaps in the surface.
There's the tin all full of wax, and the rest goes into the muffin pan now.
I got about 5 of the cups full with the wax. These serve as reloads for the stove. Once you get a good solid flame going on top of the stove (ideally, the flame should be coming from the whole surface), you can drop one of these on top and let the heat melt the wax down into the cardboard again. You could also melt it and pour it in manually, but that's a bit lame when you have the self-reloading option.
I've got video of the first burn tests, but I haven't edited them yet so this pic is a placeholder. Here's what I learned: This thing works like a candle. You need to burn the wax off of the wick first in order to get something to catch. When your wick is a 3" diameter piece of cardboard, that's kinda tough. I did eventually get it to start by shoving some matchsticks down into the cardboard and letting them burn down. After it cooled from this, I went back and tried it with just a regular lighter and it lit up much faster and more evenly. I think getting a good solid burn on it is just a matter of getting a tiny bit of wick exposed over the whole surface. You'll see the flames on the video. It's really pretty impressive.
(Watch on youtube here:
Paraffin Stove)
So there you go. It took a very short time to complete and cost me a total of maybe $2.50 if you're extremely generous on the price of the wax. You can also use found tins for this. If you use pomade or margarita salt or something that comes in a tin like this, those would work just fine. You can also use an old tuna can or a soup can or something if you want to. I like the tin because it's sort of self-contained and has a lid. Please let me know if you have any questions on how to make one of these or really anything else you want to know on the subject. I'm not an expert, but I'll do my best. Thanks for reading!
