penngolliwog

Thankyou; I will look into it

Hi there, I am making wax shells for pillar candles. Soy wax with fragrance oil is placed inside the shells. The shells are 80% paraffin and 20% stearin. The high content of stearin is to increase the opacity, because they are carved with artistic designs. The core is 100% soy wax. To make the sells, I heat the paraffin/stearin blend to 90degC (194F) and then pour into the attached stainless steel molds. They are then placed in a water bath for a few minutes. After the time's up, they are removed and the liquid wax poured out. When the wax has set, the wax shells are pushed out of the molds with minimal effort. My issue is this. While setting, half of the shells pull away slightly from the molds and these are good shells. The other half cling to the molds and this causes them to become brittle. Why? As the inside wax hardens, it shrinks and pulls apart, creating cracks. In the top photo, you can just make out a crack or two (sorry for the blurry images!) This is not a show stopper as the broken shells just go back into the pot, but it would be nice to increase my yield to more than 50% I have oiled the molds with vegetable oil - this stops the wax clinging, but then you don't get a properly shaped shell because it seems that some level of bonding is required for this. I'm just wondering if you know of any other 'de-clinging' agent ? Or is there another way to deal with this issue? I'd rather not decrease my stearin percentage, but can try that if necessary.

My thoughts are to insert the candle into some sort of tube with the bottom facing upwards and sticking out of the tube slightly, then cut/plane/grind off what's sticking out.