How to Make an Olive Oil Lamp

How to Make an Olive Oil Lamp Hi, in this video I'm going to show you how to make an olive oil lamp using Bushcraft techniques and materials that are easily found regardless of where you live. Okay, first we’re going to make the bowl. So what we're going to do is use a very traditional technique called coal burning which you're going to see in a little bit and the raw materials we need are something to make the bowl out of. This is an old piece of fence that when I cut open I saw with cedar. Still very solid, not rotted and all, dead dry. This is going to be perfect. This is a piece of coal which you will see again in a little bit. I need the spoon knife which is going to gauche out my depression and I just need some wood shavings of some kind, anything just to keep the fire going. All right, to get started I'm just going to take my spoon knife and I'm going to carve a little depression right here in the middle, place to set the coal and get my fire started. All right, so I'm going to take this little shavings and I'm going to put them in the depression, put my piece of charcoal on top. That’s kind of act like a grate so we can get some air underneath the charcoal. And I'm going to take these pieces of shavings, wood shavings set them on top and I'm going to light it up, so this maybe something that you could do on your grill if you live in the urban area or if you have yard or something like that you could just do it outside. It's not going to be a very big fire. All right, as you can my charcoal was going well, if you want to make this process a little simpler you can use charcoal out of your grill after you cook or something like that so you don’t have to go through the lighting process. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to blow air into the depression there to make sure that’s nice and hot and so that with my spoon knife all I have to do later is scrape out ashes. Of course if you were doing this in the woods you would just take the ambers from your fire and throw it down there but since we’re trying to do this in any sort of environment city or where at any place we’re using this easily found charcoal. So while this is burning down you can see my charcoal is in a nice depression I just take a stick that I've sharpen and I scrape some of this burnt wood so I can see my progress and also expose the fresh wood underneath. Okay, I've remove the charcoal because my hole is now deep enough and I'm just going to take my sharpened piece of wood and I'm just going to carve out everything I can before I switch to my metal knife and let this cool down a bit. So what I'm doing now is I'm going to take the spoon knife and I'm shaping the inside of the bowl. Spoon knife is a great tool and it is something that we may not use as often as we would like too and so with this project we’re really going to be comfortable because we’re going to get a lot of use out of this knife. I'm going to shape this bowl on the inside before I start to work on the outside. The next step is take a saw and remove as much as the scrap wood around your bowl as you can because now what we're going to do is we're going to be comfortable with that most important Bushcraft tool which is our knife and we're going to shape the rest of our bowl. Okay, so here's my finish bowl I'm just sewing it up with some camellia oil. I use this oil on all my knives and my tools, it’s also great on wood but the nice thing about it is eatable so when it gets on our food there's no problem. So now let's put all this together. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take some rocks that I've found and use the small wick, okay. So now, I'm going to put the rocks and assemble them with the wick so that the wick is pinch about right there. So what's going to happen is this going to draw the olive oil up but the flame is going to be able to go down and this is how you control how high the flame actually is. So my rocks are all assemble I have my wick sandwich between this two rocks that’s trick of course you have to find some rocks that fit together nicely. And so I'm just going to pour some olive oil into the bowl. Here's the close of shadow that completed olive oil lamp. There's our bowl of course with our olive oil in it. This wick is sandwich between two heavy pieces of felt part so it’s nice and secure. The wick is saturated with olive oil before you light it that’s important. Here's a piece of obsidian for color, then go ahead and light the wick for you see, as you can see what it looks like. To make this lamp today I took Bushcraft techniques and shrink them down to a scale that accessible to everyone. The bowl was made using the coal burning technique the same techniques that’s been used for thousands of years around the word. And for those of you that don’t get the curve as much as you may like too there's plenty of that and this is well. So for more information on the gear you saw today to make this lamp please visit my website at www.bushcraftnorthwest.com. Thanks very much.