Musings

Wax Works

Winter is settling in here on the homestead, with a couple of inches of snow today and sub-zero temperatures due in a coupe of days, no telling what the wind-chill will be if the breeze gets up to the 40 mph range that is not uncommon out here.  Although the weather is increasingly brutal and the pace of activities remains high, I wanted to take a minute to walk you through the wax works in Chez Barn.

I render the raw beeswax into purified material as I described here and then I turn it over to my wife for final processing.  As a former experimental scientist she is pretty scrupulous about here approach, which has helped me a lot.  She solved a problem I had been having in getting minute specs of debris in the raw material, and she observed the way I was working and straightened me out.

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She takes the slabs of purified wax and melts it in a dedicated crock pot (the solar oven is not an option in winter here) and fills the silicone rubber molds “just right” on the kitchen counter.  Once the blocks cool and are popped out of the molds, they move to the dining table where she weighs them each on a digital scale to make sure they are all 4.1 ounces.  Then she cuts each printed label page in half and wraps the blocks, glues their end flaps, and sticks them in a box to be put on the inventory shelf in the living room closet.  She can produce about 25 blocks on a good day, but less when she is busy with things like cooking, which she loves to do and I love her cooking too!

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Then you order it and I send it to you.