EricofAZ

I've used HTP and 4630 and no problems. The only time they shroom too much is if I overload the FO and go above 9 percent. I'm assuming you didn't do that since you've been making candles for a long time. Are you adding any other oils like mineral or coconut oil? Maybe the FO is blended differently from other FO's that you regularly get?

If you buy raw wicks, off a spool or roll, they all come from one manufacturer. For example, only Wedo makes ECO wicks. Only Heinz makes the CD's. So it doesn't matter who you buy the raw wicks from. The seller is only the distributor (unless you buy in bulk from the mfgr.)

As for the pre-tabbed and primed wicks, that's a whole different story. Not every re-seller primes the wicks the same. Some prime with low MP wax, some with high MP wax, some with microcrystaline wax, some just coat the outer fibers with the primer and some soak the wick until the core is fully primed.

I prime my own, so I don't have to add primer as a variable in candle testing.

So the two above answers are correct. Both no and yes to your question. No if you are buying raw wicks, yes if you are buying pre-tabbed/primed wicks.

On rare occasion you may find some rolls that were not stored well (rain or smoke or dust damage, etc) and all bets are off when that happens (be careful about ebay, etc). Candlewic is a good place to buy rolls. Peaks and Lonestar also sell raw wicks.

Yeah, they don't return my calls either. I walk in and get what I want. I know they pay close attention to shipping so I would assume their internet sales are OK, but I never bought that way.

The fresh cut grass smells spot on for its name. I'm out of that. Someone here compared it to the one from peaks I think and said the snowdrift was more accurate, but Peaks was stronger.

Since you are poking, the voids should undoubtedly be smaller. I like wicks over wickpins because wicks blend in with the tops better. You're right, once the burn gets going, the liquid will fill in a smaller void nicely.

One question. Are your wicks saturated to the core with a primer wax or is the core still dry with a light primer coating? The reason I ask is because a wick that is not saturated can create voids during cooling. As the air heats up in the core, and the thin outer shell melts, it forms bubbles along the length of the wick. If the core is saturated with high temp priming wax, then this won't happen.

Just because the wick has an outer was feel to it doesn't mean its wax at the core. Most pre-made wicks are merely outer coatings.

Sometimes I prime all the way, sometimes I just use raw wick off the spool and let the hot pour prime the wick. Both are better than an improperly primed wick, but the raw wick does still tend to make bubbles.

I prime with a high temp micro wax and heat it to 200 degrees and let the raw wick sit in it until the air is expanded completely out of the wick. At that temp, you can see it foam for a bit in the presto pot. I imagine that is what is happening at the slightly lower temp with the shell core when you pour the mould.

I thought I had that but no. All I have is Bamboo and Pear Tarragon.

They look great.

I have to agree. The first and second burn are fine. No need to have a FMP on the first burn, even though customers expect it. Do make sure the first burn has a good throw. Catching up during the subsequent burns is just right. What is really important is how the burn goes at the end. Usually, that gets hot.

I tend to touch the jar at various stages. About a half hour into any burn, the upper part of the jar is the hottest. After that, the rest of the glass acts as a heat sink and the temp on the glass surface reduces a bit. The only time it is a real issue is the last "bitter end" when the heat is at the bottom, the glass is holding in the heat, and the surface that the container is on may become sensitive to the heat.

If your first burn was wall to wall in 10 minutes with a torch flame, you could bet that the end would be disastrous.

I think you're off to a good start.

Women!

Ok, take it to a garage and have the folks who dispose of motor oil add it to the mix.

Awww, come on, Stella. Einstein and I have our best quality time when we are tabbing raw wick off a spool after pre-soaking it in micro wax. Its like a great father / cat day.

I live here in Tucson and have been in their building when they were at the old location. Bill mixes the scents and they are dead on. I thought they were pretty strong. One of the members here compared Snowdrift's fresh cut grass with some from other manufacturers and thought Snowdrift was accurate but not as strong. I've had no difficulty with it.

They have (or had) a deal where you buy a $50/year membership and get 10 percent off. And another 5 percent on the first Friday of the month (which they are only open for 3 hours) and 20 percent on your birthday. Dunno if they still do that or if the percentages have changed.

I buy my EO's from them. Great prices. Pure EO's. I've shared some of my EO candles in the swaps before here on craftserver and received excellent feedback.

One of these days I'm going to get out to their new location and say hi and buy more. Unfortunately for me, all my candle stuff is now in storage. Hopefully in a few months I'll have a new lab.

I don't know much about their customer service since I tend to walk in, but I know I can never get through on the phone and they don't call back when I leave a message. Haven't heard anyone else complain though.

If you have any FO or EO interests, let me know. I still have some here and can maybe send a sample or two. I don't have much, but some.

Oh, I should say that I've bought lip balm and butters from them and been very happy with the product. Price is another thing and I realize there are others selling at different prices, but the quality is first rate IMHO.

I like those jars. They are really affordable through generalwax including cheap shipping to where I live. You have a good burn going there.

Blue Spruce is very strong in paraffin for me. Almost too strong.

I think this is a consumer expectation. My GF wants to smell the candle all over the room within a half hour. She says the Yankme brand (Brand Y) does that and wants to know why mine don't. After they get going for an hour or so, she says mine are stronger. So the difference is indeed how fast the MP forms. Mine won't burn her when she picks them up. In all fairness, Brand Y probably won't either. But the hot ones described above will.

So I think achieving a wide MP quickly is important and the only way I can see this is to play with the wax until the candle unit is right, and not overwicking to get there faster.

Comparing ECO's to CD's is kinda tough cuz the ROC charts are different. The ECO's are often rated based on their performance in soy and the CD's based on paraffin.

However, this is an interesting comparison chart here:

http://www1.stimpson.com/~stimpson/WicksUnlimited.pdf

All the CD's have pool diameters smaller than the ECO 2. (Again, keep in mind different wax for the test.)

The ROC that is just below the ECO 2 is the CD 4. (If the wax choice doesn't matter, which it does.)

The FH of the CD that is just below the ECO 2 is the CD 5. (Same parenthetical.)

I do often go back and forth in paraffin between ECO and CD. My notes indicate that with Harmony wax, the ECO 2 may be comparable to the CD 4.

I can't give you direct info, but in looking at my spreadsheet on wicking it seems that the correlation might be similar to 2:1 meaning CD8=ECO4, CD4=ECO2.

Hope that helps.

Part of the secret is having the right keywords and medatags. Then optimizing the text so that certain words show up multiple times. There is a whole lot that goes into how google ranks websites for the search pages.

Once that is done, the simple things around town to groups you market to are also helpful.

Jonsie, well, there really is no correlation of brand z or w.

Here's what I learned the first time through and it was contradicted the second time. The first time I researched, HP had a yield of 3500 pages per their standards per cartridge and they wanted $120/cartridge. Brother claimed a yield of 2500 pages per cartridge and they were $70/cartridge. That sounds like Brother was cheaper.

However, the price was so close that I was more attentive to quality. Quality turned out to be about the same.

I found refills for Brother on Ebay for like $15. Been doing that with the older B/W Brothers here and they work fine. I've refilled HP lasers and its a bit more involved to add toner to an existing cartridge.

I don't have an exact paper count, but my 4 year experience with the Brother B/W laser MFC 8870 is that 3500 pages for a toner cartridge is probably pretty close. I get a bit more than that actually, though it is double spaced text. Seems I'm changing toner about every 5 or 6 thousand pages (just over a case of paper).

Then I thought about the yield from my HP inkjet. Granted this is apples and oranges, but my 7200 inkjet claims 400 pages and I get about 100 at most.

So call it a personal trust issue, I believe Brother and I don't believe HP.

At my recent purchase on the Brother laser, I noticed that Brother printed on the box the yield of the cartridges and HP did not. I asked about this and was told that HP and others were pulling their 'print yield' stats due to unreliability. I asked who the 'others' were and there was no coherent reply.

So who knows. I'm sure the HP will be just as efficient as Brother on the usage and both have decent sized cartridges. I would imagine there is a refill option for the HP. I did give very serious thought to the HP and if Brother was not an option, then HP would be the choice for me for the color laser.

Again, I didn't get to compare the Oki and I kept all the lookie loo stuff to under $700 range. I want to write it off on the taxes as a purchase rather than a 5 year amortization.

Given the higher temps of palm, does it deform the clamshell?

Great idea. Would the non-polarity be an issue in the original mixing of the gel? Given the higher temps needed for the HP over paraffin, wouldn't it be necessary to select FO's that still will mix well with the gel?

Why don't you put it over on the gel forum and see what Richard, er, Kawboy has to say. He's still hanging around.

No. Some of the oils not only have DPG in them, some have an alcohol content. Many are water based. Alcohol and candle wax and flame make a bad mix and water based won't mix well at all. The formulas for an FO to mix with wax are pretty unique from what I can tell.

Jonsie, the krylon was a coating on a forever candle. It was easy to print on nice paper and glue it to the candle and then coat it with the krylon. However, I might change to a water base like floor wax and that would probably work better with laser.

Great job, they came out just fine.

mparadise, yup, the toner price is very important. Definitely worth spending a little more for the printer to get a good toner refill price.

Jonsie, I may have mentioned elsewhere, but when I use krylon to spray over the Brother black laser, it runs. I haven't tried it on this new color laser, but I'll bet it does the same thing. The inkjet does not run when I use krylon.

We didn't have an Oki to look at, I have heard good things about them though.

Jonsie,

If you don't have access to a good store that has lots of models to choose from, tell me what paper you want to use (or send me a few sheets) and send me a sample print you want on it and I'll go to one of our Office Depot stores that has a bunch of these set up for prints and run them for you. I'm pretty good with graphics so maybe even tell me what you do and I'll fake it. I won't share your private graphics with anyone.

Most of the laser prints will "run" when sprayed with Krylon. I'm looking at other sprays like fixitif, etc.

Funny you should ask. I just did a lot of research on this and bought one.

Now, my usage is bound to be different from yours. I needed affordable high speed for the office that has quality color capability and is fast enough that we can use it as a workhorse.

We bought the Brother 9970 CDW for $650

I looked at the quality of the color print from Samsung. No go.

I didn't want to pay for the higher end Xerox, etc, that start at $2500 and go up to the tens of thousands. We didn't need that.

Pages per minute were important to me. Going too fast is not good for a color printer, it results in lower quality, so balancing PPM with quality was worth looking at, hence Samsung failed.

HP and Brother had the best quality on the market for low end color lasers so I checked those out.

Both have some lower end models that have lower PPM's, like 9 to 12 PPM. That's fine if you print labels and decals, etc, and have time to run a print job overnight. I have an office to keep going so we needed to up that speed hence the higher priced models.

It came down to Brother and HP. The HP had higher cost toners but boasted higher page counts per toner. HP is starting to not publish this info because there is no industry standard to compare to. Brand Z tests at double space lines, brand W tests at single spaced typed lines so Brand Z yields more pages on the stats but brand W is really more economical type thing.

So I looked at refills and there are refills for Brother. I have two older Brother MFC 8670 machines and they are work horses and they take refills just fine.

The HP didn't have the tray features I wanted. I could load an envelope but not a single check. Brother allowed this. The HP had a better touch screen FAX pad than Brother but who cares? My staff can use a button pad for FAXes.

Both HP and Brother had scanners and the Brothers I owned had occasional problems picking up two pages at a time on the scanner, but I'm told HP also has this issue and I know Xerox and IBM and quite frankly, everyone has this issue.

Both machines need to get hot to print. The Brother tends to curl paper. I don't know if the HP does. That is not a big issue with me because after I mail a letter, it doesn't matter and if I print letterhead, it flattens out over time. That might be an issue for you with special paper so take some to the store and run a few test prints to find out.

I think there is a lower end Brother with the same print engineering that just doesn't have the bells and whistles which will do the job for you for around $300.

Our MFC Brother models have lasted well and been great workhorses. One that I bought which has a 100,000 print capacity is now at 95000 prints. I did not replace the drum as often as they said, nor the cartridges. Never had it serviced. I paid $350 at Costco and after 3 years, I'm laughing at all the other offices that paid $14,000 for Sharpe copiers on a lease with a $100/month service contract.

Oh, we looked at Canon, the machine didn't have the ability to handle small checks either and it had low PPM counts so we didn't even bother to look at quality. Might be good quality for you to look at though.