German Ingenuity

Or, being a short history on the wax torch (or blowlamp)

(I know, I know, it really should be `Duetsch Ingenuity', but then I'd lose the alliteration:)

Dietmar Kuehlmorgen asked me to show him the pages about his torch before I posted them, and was gracious to provide me with a little history of the manufacturing process for his torch, which I reproduce below; I've broken text up into more paragraphs and adjusted spelling and the like to more closely agree with standard usage, but otherwise reproduce his information unchanged with editorial comments in italic:

``The history of the torch, before I made this one: More than 20 years ago I got a mineral-examination-kit including a blowpipe and an alcohol-burner. (I have a blowpipe and alcohol lamp, that my dad gave me at least 20 years ago. I tried soldering a 20 gauge copper wire with it. No dice. I know even today people are theoretically making jewelry with these things but I still can't imagine it.) The blowpipe got lost and I didn't have the pocket-money to buy the alcohol. But I wanted to play with the flame and searched for replacements. I found the orifice of an old butane lighter, some brass parts from tubeless-tire-valves and the PVC-mantle of an old cable.

``The orifice was soldered into the brass pipe and the hose fit onto the other end of the pipe. I had old candles, cotton cloth and a tealight-jar for the burner. (The wick, comparatively speaking, is huge, maybe 2cm across, and, I assume, what the `cotton cloth' was used for. At Gathering, Dietmar told us about some the various fuels he'd tried, including candle-wax. As I recall, olive oil was not a good candidate.) The first time I mounted the pipe on top of a jam glass with rubber rings (presumably rubberbands, not O-rings) and the jar was supported by a smaller jam glass. After few experiments I didn't want to blow into the hose all the time. I took canisters of some detergents, rinsed them carefully and mounted the sockets of bycicle-valves in the lids. Now I could pump them up till the flame started to surge and work with the torch till the pressure was too low.

``I had about 100 liter or more air capacity and it worked 10-15min at least. After that time I had to pump again. (With a bicycle pump, one presumes...? This is one use for old bike parts I never envisioned, despite having a goodly & growing number of them around:) A selfmade manifold gave me the chance to attach more capacity in the form of truck-tire-liners. The idea with the aquarium pump came later.

The black metal structure was only the last step to a really comfortable support for the orifice and the burner. It is made from the cutoff ends of metal table-legs and some other scrap parts. Only the welding was done by a friend. He offered this job to me to get more practice in E-welding. Otherwise I would have used more screws in the construction. The tealight-jar and the orifice are still the first one I used. Everything else was altered at least once.''

(copyright 20aug04 Dietmar Kuehlmorgen. All rights reserved.)

Peculiarly enough, the wax torch reminded me nothing so much as the various jury rigged items I saw throughout Vietnam; there are any number of little one room garages to service the ubiquitious motor scooters, dark, mysterious and full of unidentified metal objects, lurking in the gloom; one particularly vivid memory involves a man squatting in the doorway of one such, forging a piece of molten steel, as blacksmiths once commonly did a century ago in the US. Nowadays it's nearly impossible to do anything more complicated than change the oil of a modern car, and how many people even bother attempting to repair household appliances, let alone creating entirely new things out of them?