Sir,
I clicked on this link from your site, JOTW – Home Made Vegetable Oil Lamp. This got me to thinking about something I read about and tried once, some years ago. Take a tangerine, and using a knife, cut the nub off of the top, to expose the fruit, and using a spoon, separate the fruit from the peel and the segments from each other, leaving the sting like ” pith ” that runs from top to bottom, down the center of the segments, connected to the bottom. After letting the thing dry a bit, the pith is cut a bit to act as a free standing ” wick “, a bit of olive, vegetable, or corn oil is put in, leaving about 1/4” of the pith above the oil to light. If it soaks up the oil enough, the lamp can be made to last quite a while for survival needs.
If you go to the extreme in a survival situation, a lamp could be fashioned from natural clay like the ones seen in the Middle East that have been made the same way since biblical times. . Many thanks to Hawaiian K. for the link. I like to try some of these type preparedness do-it-yourself projects from time to time to learn a new skill that may help me and my family some bad day. – Dim Tim