Wicks away!

Remember that Dietz wick lantern? I finally took a little time and put it back together.

I didn't paint everything on it, I figured the heat would be hard on the paint.

In retrospect I probably should have painted the ring under the fuel cap and the part under the burner but the lack of paint does add some visual interest.

One of the kinda nice things about wick lanterns is that something has to be really wrong before it won't light...

I also took a minute to put a new wick and mantle on my aluminum Aladdin

Aladdin mantles burn off differently than Coleman, where a Coleman mantle kind of smolders the Aladdin flashes off with a woof! Much more exciting than I expected. I'm pleased with this lamp it puts out more light than the other one I have which is no huge surprise as that one has a mantle that was on it when I got it. Aladdin mantle production was stopped for a couple years and only resumed in like 2012, AFAIK they're now made by the same people who make Peerless mantles.

On the whole the wickies are fun but I don't think you need to worry about me switching over to them, the light output is quite low and theres no noise so they don't excite me in the way that pressure lamps do...

Wickie time!

 So in the interminable delay between posts I've kept working on the wickie. It took maybe 4 days in the citric acid before all the rust came off the main part of the lantern although the smaller assemblies were done in a day or two. I think I was right in my estimation that this sat somewhere that it got dripped on, the horizontal (or nearly horizontal) surfaces on it were the worst. In the end I could just scrub the rust off with a steel brush.

Since the rust was pretty gross I bought some "Rustoleum Rusty Metal Primer" which is supposed to give a really good adhesion and rust prevention. I found that it was dammed hard to get a good coating of the stuff on the vertical surfaces without it running. I sanded off runs 3 or 4 times. Worse the runs would take forever to dry although sunlight really seemed to help in that regard. I did finally get it on good after spraying a couple super thin coats that I then had to blend carefully together. I finished it with a coat of filler primer to fill in any sanding scratches I might have not seen.

For paint I went with Krylon Hunter Green which is the same color I used for my Coleman 237. I feel like it matches the older Coleman green nicely. Its also very nice paint to work with, it comes out in a much thinner spray than Rustoleum.

Sadly after getting the lantern covered I ran out of Krylon and was completely unable to find any locally. It appears that Rustoleum has absolutely cornered the market for spray bombs. Other than a couple cheap no-name paints and some specialized tractor paints thats all I could find anywhere. Fortunately Amazon saves the day. They had the right stuff which should arrive at the end of the week.

On a side note I'm DONE with Photobucket. Their app is slow, and the webpage is pitifully/painfully slow. Today I wanted to crop the images above and even after hitting reload 4 times the image editor just wouldn't open my image. In the time it took for Photobucket to not work I uploaded 9 images to Google Images, cropped those two and figured out how to post them. Its not perfect but it'll do...

A what now?

I'd said for a long time that I had no real interest in wick lanterns. Well at camp we've got an old hot blast lantern that came with the place and last fall I spent a bunch of time playing with it. While it doesn't throw much light it doesn't use a whole bunch of fuel and doesn't make any noise. We used it for a nightlight for which it worked out perfect.

A hot blast lantern uses the hot exhaust gases to feed back into the burner where any left over fuel in the hot gasses gets burned. This process costs a little brightness but reduces fuel use. The alternative is a cold blast lantern which uses the heat of the hot combustion gasses to draw cold air into the lantern. The cold air being drawn in has more oxygen in it and is more dense since its colder which allows for a brighter flame although it'll cost some more fuel. Both hot blast and cold blast lanterns fall into the "tubular lantern" category. This confused me at first because I'd seen things like Aladdin lamps which have round wicks in a tube shape. So don't be confused by tubular lanterns which carry the air into the burner in tubes and round wick lanterns which have a round (or tube shaped) wick.

Anyway since I'd had some experience playing with the hot blast at camp got me interested in cold blast lanterns. Before I'd started looking for them I was seeing wick lanterns all over the place, now of course I'm hardly seeing any and the ones I am seeing are really expensive. So I was really happy to see this at a yardsale:

Its a Dietz D-Lite No. 2 made from 1919 to 1947, its got a great big 7/8" wick rated for around 7 candle power (cp). The D-Lite is a short globe lantern which is easier to clean than the tall globe models but it costs some light. The tall globes would get closer to 12cp. For comparison a Coleman 200A is more like 300cp. It had no price tag, I offered $3 and he accepted.

As you can see my lantern is all rusty, it looks like it was sitting under a hole in the barn roof for years and years. Originally the lantern was galvanized and the underside is perfect looking but every inch of the rest of the lantern is covered in rust.

The rust is worst at the top, it gets better toward the bottom of the air tubes and bad again at the flared part on top of the fuel tank. Also the top is dented and the whole top end of the lantern is twisted and leaning slightly.

I put some kero into the tank, trimmed the wick a little and it lit right up. Thats the great thing about these lanterns, theres only a moving parts, wick lifter, the globe lifter and the ring on top so theres really not much that can fail.

So what to do, what to do? I could leave it rusty, after all it works. I could clean the rust off, oil the metal and keep it that way hoping I always keep enough oil on it to prevent rust, or I could clean the rust off and paint it. While this one wasn't originally painted they were sometimes and many other models were and since I paid $3 for the lantern I'm not particularly worried about originality.

In the end I decided to clean and repaint. How to clean off the rust? I'm going the easy way:

The bucket is full of citric acid, the plastic wrapped brick on top holds the lantern down, I plugged the fuel tank, it was perfectly clean so I didn't want to worry about having citric acid in it. It took 4 days of soaking to get all the rust off but it finally came clean. As of yesterday I got the lantern out of the acid bath, rinsed off, dried and primed. The burner cover and top end pieces I've already painted Coleman green (Krylon Hunter Green). I went a little overboard with the primer on the main lantern body so I'll have to go back and sand off some runs before I can paint. It takes a couple days for the thick primer to harden enough to really do that well.

So green is the color except for the wires that hold the globe in place, I'm going to paint those grey. I'm not going to paint the bail at all, any paint on that would just wear off anyway...