What's the best fuel for a small smoke lamp?

Mineral spirits, charcoal lighter fluid or kerosene always works for me. Leave the wick tall and you'll get plenty o' black smoke with either one.



This one is powered by mineral spirits.

Hank

Joe,

I remember as a kid my parents bought me a chemistry set. With the way the wax candles it came with would blacken test tubes I imagine you could use one of them.

Steve

Joe,

Use the same spirit that you use to make your Spirit Stain.

Paraffin ,which I believe you call kerosene ,is what I have used all my working life .Occasionally mixed a little motor oil if it was not sooty enough .

Home heating oil or diesel fuel burns with a sooty flame too. When I've wanted an accumulation of lampblack to dye epoxy, lighting an acetylene brazing torch inside a tin can without turning on the oxygen provided plenty of soot.

I use kerosene, no problem getting the work black(and my hands).
Mike

Back in my service rifle competition days, I used a miner's carbide lamp to blacken my sights, as did a number of my colleagues. Just unscrew the base, add a few pieces of carbide, spit in it and reassemble it. This should produce enough gas for ordinary blacking purposes. For more gas, just add more moisture. My lamp came with a cigarette lighter type device on the reflector to light it, so no need for matches.

Carbide lamps work very well, also; but I have a hard time finding carbide now, the can I had lasted for years but had to be left behind in a "move". I had kerosene on hand, anyway, for emergency lamps.
Mike.

Plenty of carbide on line.

If you want to buy just a small container of fuel, lighter fluid works very well too. The kind you use in Zippos.

I live in Cheshire very close to the town of Crewe not that the name of Crewe will mean a lot but it is the home of Rolls Royce & Bentley Cars, though sadly now owned by German companies with only Bentley still manufacturing in Crewe. Also Crewe was the home of one of the largest and oldest Locomotive works in the UK but now only a shadow of its former self. What as this all got to do with fuel for smoke lamps you are thinking, I will get to that honest but the background story is interesting. The Locomotive works ran on smoke lamps, every fitter and Engineer had one. With so many lamps in use every lamp was made by hand in house from tin plated Copper sheet each lamp was of its time state of the art but not a thing of beauty but non the less highly prized. So much so Engineers or fitters that left the Loco works to work at Rolls Bentley took their lamps with them also there was a healthy black market in the lamps too. And the reason for this was the lamp was designed by some unknown person from the dim past and they got it right in every way. Firstly, the lamp could be used at any angle the wick chimney was insulated from your hand so the lamp was always cool to the touch and even if you knocked them over they would not leek fuel but would stay lit for sideways use, it also came with its own snuffer. The preferred fuel for use in these smoke lamps was T.V.O Tractor Vaporising Oil, at the time extremely cheap to purchase and worked exceedingly well. Fitting with the thickness of smoke has now become little used so the majority of these lamps where scraped, the one in the photographs I removed from a works scrap bin some 40 years ago to stop it being lost for ever.





If you look on a map you will see Crewe is in a Agricultural area with no long history of engineering. This was ideal for the Locomotive manufacturers they trained their own workers and Engineers to a very high standard for the times. This is the reason Rolls Bently, ERF, Fodens, and an Ordinance factory all opened in areas close to the works so they could benefit from the large pool of very highly trained and skilled workers.

Good design for a smoke lamp.
Lamp oil from the hardware store.
De-odorized kerosene I think.
Prefer Mama's old lipstick and a tooth brush for wood to metal fit.
Sharpie felt pens for metal to metal fit.
Chuck

I use smoke to inlet my stocks and burn kerosene,Damascus thanks for that very interesting post. Bobby

I use a white-board, dry-erase felt tip pen. Lots easier than a lamp and soot.