NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Tallow, was: Voyaging the traditional way
From: Jared Sherman
Date: 2004 Nov 6, 21:43 -0500
From: Jared Sherman
Date: 2004 Nov 6, 21:43 -0500
Trevor- http://www.missionpeaksoap.com/Base_Oils_Quick.htm You can indeed buy beef tallow today, in this case from northern California at $12.95/USgallon, or $44.95/5USG, which probably would last you for a while.Since it still is beef fat, I'd expect it to still go rancid after a while. There are adhesive waxes, used in graphic arts for "pasteup", that can be thinned with mineral spirits to make a very tacky soft wax that is stable and inert, if kept in a sealed jar so the solvent doesn't evaporate out. That might be a simpler way to go, you could probably dice up white paraffin and vaseline in mineral spirits to get somethign similar too. (It can take a week or two for the parafin to thoroughly dissolve, bear in mind what we in the US call "kerosene" is also called "paraffin oil", the paraffin wax is quite compatible.)