Candle making

Last saturday one of my collegues got married. At work we had been all very agreeing for weeks on end to do something, but it wasn't until thursday that we finally woke up and realized that it was actually too late to organise anything. So we decided to give money (a commodity always in short supply whenever people marry or build a house or both).
Now that we had decided what to give, we had to find some original way of presenting it. One of the ideas was to put the money in a wheel of Gouda, a joke on the fact he recently moved to the Netherlands (physically that is, mentally he had dropped out of Belgium long before). But obtaining a cheese would probably have been too difficult, especially considering the short timeframe. So we adopted Litrik's idea: put the money as coins in a candle.
As I have some experience with candles (and with just about anything else as well, provided it burns like hell), I volunteered to make that candle.

The idea was to melt tealights and cast a candle of about 10cm diameter and 20cm tall. We estimated that a tealight had a diametre of approximately 3cm and a hight of 1cm. That makes 1.5²*3.14 = 7cm³. To reach the dimensions we wanted, we would need 5²*3.14*20/7 = 224 tealights. So I went to the nearest Ikea to buy three packs of 100 tealights. I also made a visit to AsterX to buy a cotton wick.
This is what it all looked like:


My idea was to use a leftover piece of plastic pipe as mould; however, the piece I had in mind had apparently disappeared. I had no time to drive around looking for pipes, so I had to improvise a bit (I'm usually quite a good at that) and make the mould myself.
I did have some heavy cardboard pipes (each over 2m long and filled with approximately 35m of aluminium profiles left over from a previous project). I couldn't use those of course, they were still in use; however, I could use one as mould for my mould (please bear with me). I wrapped some cling film around it, followed by a layer of paper (for sturdyness), followed by a layer of cling film again. I then cut it off off the pipe and taped the ends together again.
In theory this should have provided me with a nice round tube of 10cm diameter. In reality though, I ended up with a sagging, all but round piece of stuff held together with duct tape. Anyway, I had no time to try anything else, so I took al old cast iron cooking pot and taped the poor tube-aspiring thing to the bottom.


Next time on Blogspot: HOT DRIPPING WAX!