Tallow Paste Wax Redux

By request, here’s a blow-by-blow of my tallow/beeswax paste wax.

When making small formulation test batches I rely on my yard sale fondue heating plate.  It’s a pretty steady 150-degrees F so I do not need to watch it with an eagle eye, as it will keep chugging along until my wax and any other ingredients are melted. A Pyrex sauce pan fits it perfectly so I just toss in the ingredients and check back in an hour.

For almost all of my formulation endeavors I combine the components by weight.  Since I am not doing anything other than melting, in this case I do not really need to use one of my analytical scales.  A digital kitchen scale is more than adequate.

The beeswax is of course the product that we make by hand, triple filtered Tupelo Honey beeswax.  I would gladly use local beeswax but there just aren’t enough local beekeepers.

For the tallow I just used some purified beef tallow I bought on-line.  I have not tried using any other tallow but will entertain the idea.  This works fine for me, is nearly odorless (if I close my eyes and inhale a big snort of air I can almost imagine the faintest smell of pot roast), and has remained stable for the four years I’ve had this container open.  I could certainly add a dash of turpentine as a fragrance but don’t need that for my own use.  Originally, I bought this tallow to lubricate wood threads on my bench and Moxon vises.

For my paste wax test batch I wound up with 75 grams of beeswax to 150 grams of tallow as the sweet spot.  When sneaking up on this (melting and cooling, melting and cooling) I added a bit of one or the other (ALWAYS keeping notes along the way) until I got the outcome I wanted.

Once everything is melted and uniform I just let it cool,  The result is a very firm paste wax that can be used like any other.   I’ve ordered some more tallow to make a bigger batch so I can send out samples to those of you who requested some.

Of course my curiosity bone wonders what the result would be if I used Blend 31 instead of pure beeswax…

Stay tuned.