[Yesterday’s run: 7 miles with boardtown runners, today: rest]
This morning I worked on wax refining again.
The large cake of wax we got from our first meltdown/strain step is on the right. I used a big knife and cut into it. About half of that went into the old coffee pot along with about a cup of water.
After the wax melted down I poured it through about 6 layers of cheesecloth, into the retired french-press glass beaker. I then used a white plastic spoon to dip out the wax, being careful to avoid any little floating fuzzy/cloudy bits. I was able to fill two jelly jars! Pretty good.
I kept warming up hot water in the pot and pouring that into the beaker, bringing the level up to where I could get at it with my spoon.
I gave up with about half an inch of wax still in the beaker. You can see it in this picture just on top of the orange-ish water. It has quite a few fuzzies in it, particularly along the bottom wax/water border.
After everything cools and hardens, I’ll warm up those jelly jars a bit in a double boiler and get the wax out of them. Then I’ll empty the beaker. I may scrape some of the bottom of that remaining wax with a knife to get some of the fuzzies out. Then I’ll melt it down again with the rest of the big cake.
I’m surprised that I was able to get this much good wax out of it.
