DIY Mason Jar Oil Lamps (Making lantern and candle with cooking oil)

great lakes getting ready here in today's video we're going to talk about a couple of very simple ways to turn a regular glass jar and some

cooking

oil into a very effective and bright flashlight, but not only are we going to look at how to make a Flashlight oil, we're also going to have a little extra oil lit

candle

, also from a glass jar, and also almost exactly the same ingredients, just two different styles of glass jar and

cooking

oil

lantern

s, so let's jump in and I . First I'll show you how I did this. We're going to start with our

mason

jar

candle

style oil lamp and there's nothing easier than putting this together.

All we need for this is a regular

mason

jar. cover a piece of cotton wick approximately eight inches, a glass jar ring and, of course, our cooking oil. Now the wicks that I'm going to use for this and the other style of lamp that we're going to make is a quarter inch of 100 cotton. Thick wick Now, if you don't have a genuine wick, you can use some type of cotton cord, as long as it's 100% cotton and about a quarter inch thick and diameter, and you can make your

lantern

with a thicker one or a thinner one. wick, but to do it the way I'm doing it with the measurements and stuff, it's the quarter inch wick and to do this, we really just need to make a modification to something and that is, on this cap, we need to drill a hole in this lid and it is through that hole that our wick will be fed and we want to make sure that that hole is a little bit narrower than the thickness of the wick so that it grips the wick a little bit and doesn't let it slide into the jar and so you can make a hole with some type of punch or even the tip of a knife, but I'm going to use a drill bit and I found that the 15 64 drill bit is the perfect size.

We're going to drill a hole right in the center of this lid and I'm going to make sure to drill it from the bottom and the reason you want to drill it or drill it from the bottom is because if you're going to be left with any of these little raised edges, uh, depending on the direction of your hole, that will help prevent our wick from sliding down. You know that we will introduce it at the bottom and it will be difficult for it to fall back down. from the diameter of the hole and because these little bits of metal are going to act almost like a spike to keep it from sliding down, now we just need to run that wick through the hole coming in from the bottom and again it'll be a little snug, but if you can get past some of the little fibers you should be able to grab it just give it a little tug and you'll get that out now we just need to fill our pint jar with the cooking oil almost to the top not all the way to the top but quite a bit close and leaving about a half inch of this wick sticking out of the top so we can grab it, we'll move on. and put the wick right there and put the cap in place and then secure it with our ring.

Now I'm going to let this sit for a few minutes so the oil can start to rise up the wick and then Light it, okay, let's light our oil candle and see how it works. Now after a few minutes you should be able to feel some of that oil on this wick and if you're impatient and don't want to leave it. sit for a few minutes, you could take out some of this wick and cut it off, so now you're just working with a wick that had already been dipped in the oil, so when you first light this, it's going to start burning the cotton. a little bit, it will smoke a little bit, but really once it gets going and starts burning oil, there will be no smoke or smell or anything like that and when you want to put it out, you just put it out like you would a normal cigarette. candle either by blowing on it gently or by blowing it out and then we will make our glass jar using cooking oil by burning a lantern and this is also incredibly easy to do there are just a couple of finer points you need to make like As for building it now, since our wick will actually be down in the jar, that means a couple of things, one means we can't fill the jar with oil, in fact we're only going to put a few inches of oil in there and we can't dip the end of the wick in oil or it won't stay lit, but we need to have most of the wick in the oil and we also need a way to lift that wick and set it. stand back so we can turn it on and maintain it, so what we're going to do is just build a little kind of support out of a piece of wire.

I'm just using a piece of this galvanized wire, but you could really use any wire that's pretty stiff but still flexible enough to bend, so using some needle nose pliers I'm going to start about an inch from the end, giving myself a little of room to work with and I want to fold this into sort of a tight little loop now this is the loop that will hold the wick so we need it to be loose enough that we can get that piece of wick in there but tight enough to that it won't fall freely, but will require just a little bit of effort to move it and that's just the next thing, we need to bend this piece of wire a couple of times so that it holds the end of the wick a couple of inches above the bottom of the jar, so I'm I'm going to measure, I don't know, I'm just going to eyeball it, about that, and I'm going to bend it and then we just need a little bit of length here so that it rests at the bottom of that jar and I'm going to give it another bend, but of course we want our wick to be facing up, so now I'm going to get to the bottom and give it a little twist so that it holds the wick upright so you can get the idea. of what this is going to do when you put it in this jar and now, in order for this to stay in place while it's in use, we're going to take this long part of the wire and we're just going to bend it right at the level of the top edge of the jar, so it's going to be something like this, that's pretty much what we need, but I'm going to go ahead and trim the extra bits off the ends so it's a little bit cleaner. and neat, cut that off there, we don't really need a lot of excess overlapping the jar, so, you know, cut a couple of inches off there and there's our little wick holder, so to use that we'll just put a little bit of oil in the jar .

I'll start with I don't know an inch, inch and a half, look at what it looks like so you can see that most of the wick is now submerged in the oil, except for the tip of course, not and again we'll let this sit here. for a few minutes and let the oil rise to the exposed part of that wick where it's not submerged and then we can light this thing. Now we're going to try out our mason jar oil lantern and we're going to grab our little piece of wire here and pull the wick up high enough to light it conveniently and then we're just going to put it back in the jar and it'll take a couple of minutes again, just like the candle, to burn some of that cotton. and start burning mostly oil now real quick, let's talk about what I think are some of the pros and cons of each of these styles of mason jar

lamps

.

Firstly, with the sail style, some advantages of this are that you can fill it almost all the time. way to the top with oil, that means less time between when you have to refill it, eventually you will have to replace the wick, but in reality it will be about the same amount of time between the two styles, secondly, because it's pretty good sealed. with the lid and ring, if for some reason this were to accidentally fall off, it might be a little less disastrous than the flashlight version which of course needs to have the top open, but overall I really think I prefer the flashlight style simply because the flame is inside that glass jar, so basically you get a screen effect where I think it throws more light in all directions because it's in this glass, well we'll call it a globe since we're talking about lighting the candle , some light goes out but not more than you would expect from a candle, this flashlight really seems to illuminate things a little better and I know on camera I'm probably exaggerating this effect because here I can see this little defined candle flame , but here I can't really see the flame but just the orb of light when my camera lens picks it up because, again, that glass jar is really magnifying how much light it seems to have, so I'm really a big fan of both styles, but my two cents for what it's worth is that I like the lantern style a little better and a quick note on cooking oil that you can definitely use clean. new unused cooking oil, but you can also use used cooking oil if you have a deep fryer or something, as long as you filter it so that you have pretty much the liquid oil in your glass jar that's going to work pretty well as far as what type of oil to use.

I like to use vegetable or canola, especially since that's probably what I'll have the most on hand, especially when it comes to used oil, but something like olive oil or similar would work. I also found that a convenient way to turn off the oil lantern is to simply take the lid of a glass jar, bend it to the side a little with pliers so that it fits around the wire handle, and then simply snap it into place. and let it put out that fire, no oxygen, no flame, so there you have it, it's two versions of a glass jar cooking oil lamp or maybe more accurately, an oil candle and an oil lantern, like this that's all for now make sure you like it and subscribe and stay up to date with all our latest news including future DIY gadget videos thanks for watching and until next time this is great prep for the lakes.