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Letter Re: Homemade and Expedient Vegetable Oil Lamps
Sir,
I clicked on this link from your site, JOTW
- Home Made Vegetable Oil Lamp. This got me to thinking about something
I read about and tried once, some
years ago. Take a tangerine, and using a knife, cut the nub off of the top,
to expose the fruit, and using a spoon, separate the fruit from the peel and
the segments from each other, leaving the sting like " pith " that
runs from top to bottom, down the center of the segments, connected to the
bottom. After letting the thing dry a bit, the pith is cut a bit to act as
a free standing " wick ", a bit of olive, vegetable, or corn oil
is put in, leaving about 1/4" of the pith above the oil to light. If it
soaks up the oil enough, the lamp can be made to last quite a while for survival
needs.
If you go to the extreme in a survival situation, a lamp could be fashioned
from natural clay like the ones seen in the Middle East that have been made
the same way since biblical times. . Many thanks to Hawaiian K.
for the link. I like to try some of these type preparedness do-it-yourself
projects from time to time to learn a new skill that may help me and my family
some
bad day.
-
Dim Tim
