Episode: 2153
Title: HPR2153: Splitting a Block of Bees Wax
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2153/hpr2153.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:59:11

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This is HPR episode 2153 entitled, Clitting and Lock on Beanwax.
It is hosted by Brian and is about 18 minutes long.
The summary is, I need to split and lock on Beanwax.
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Hello, this is Brian.
Once again, I have something that I need to do.
I'm going to do the John Cope style, talk to you guys through it.
I enjoy Jezros fixing a plastic boat.
So I always think about it when I do this because I got myself a heat gun for my project.
What I'm doing is cutting a big block of beeswax.
Went down to get a friend of mine, a five gallon bucket of raw honey from one of the local
beekeepers.
So while I was there, I got myself a big old jar of honey myself.
He was getting some beeswax.
The beekeeper says, well, I do have a block, I don't know what it weighs.
Let's see, he weighs it and it's eight pounds of beeswax.
Friend of mine has only got $20 on him, extra.
So in addition to buying the honey, I just bought my honey from him, left me with $7 in
my pocket.
When he weighs it out, he's like, oh, well, I got a, I'm going to have to chip a bunch
of wax off of this.
And I said, well, what do you want for the whole block?
They wanted $28.
He had $20.
I had $7.
He took all our money for honey and wax.
End up with the whole block.
He says it's weighs a pounds, I believe, and a really cool old scale.
It's been sitting there for a bit and I just haven't gotten around a quartering it because
he put in his $20.
I put in my $7.
So what I got here is a turntable, me growing up and the folks around me called the lazy
Susan.
It's on some dry bearing, so I use it for clay and I leave it up in the rain.
So, oops, there's my knife on the floor.
I've also got a big old knife, kitchen knife, that is fairly cheap, not so sharp, but
it will work great for purposes.
I got my heat gun.
I'm going to heat this knife and I'm going to press it through this wax and I assume
that it's going to take me multiple heatings, it's lice through this wax.
So the first thing I'm going to do is put aside my knife and my heat and then I got
another spool of twine here, something cotton sturdy and I'm going to begin by marking
half in the top with it's still on my spool because I really don't know what it is going
to take.
I'm about to get this.
So maybe I should just take a few feet off of it, grab my knife, see if it's sharp
enough to cut my twine and it is just not so sharp for slicing a steak or getting through
the good skin of a hardy vegetable or something.
Alright, so I got my top pretty much halved, I'm going to flip it upside down.
I got a piece of hardy backer which is a brand name which is concrete board, backer
board for tiles and it's awesome for doing clay because it soaks up the moisture and
it's sturdy, it doesn't deform when it soaks up the moisture, it can even take a little
bit of heat but I just happen to have it out because I was doing a clay project that
threw a piece of brown paper over it so I only wax all over my clay board and now I got
this string upside down going across the bottom of my thing which is really the top of
my thing because it was cast in a bucket.
And now what I want to do is I want to mark half on the bottom, mark it in the way
I'm doing this as I'm placing my string on the corners of the wax block where I am just
eyeing half.
So and then I'm pulling it tight and I did this on up to and by pulling it tight it sticks
into the wax.
So now I've got my corners marked on the top and the bottom and I'm going to take the
handle of my knife and I'm going to press the string into the side of just on the back
corner handle just so I get a solid line all the way down this side that I can follow
when I go to slice it.
And really I only have to make my half line here and then I'll make my half line again
once I have a half.
So that he gets a solid half with no marks and I get a solid quarter with no marks.
He also gets that other quarter.
So I almost got my string.
My string is now pressed into both sides and that's really all that I need.
So it's incredible, I'm looking at the bottom and it's just loaded with propolis, I really
keep her, had a facility to process this propolis also.
It's so good for you, Midas.
But he has, I was speaking with someone the other day, he's a very good example of someone
whose operation is super efficient.
His workflow has been tailored to accommodate him collecting honey.
So he works from his house, he's got a two car garage with his big old honey spinner
drippers and slicers and everything there, but it's all geared towards making honey, none
of it's geared towards harvesting any of the other products that come along with beekeeping.
So it would be real difficult for him to bring someone else in too.
Now I would love for him to get his propolis, but when I even go there to get the honey,
he's like, oh yeah, there's some blobs over there and there's some blobs over there.
You can just take it, but it would be a whole separate operation.
His operation is gathering honey and it works well for him that way.
So come on beeswax flipped over.
I got my lines in the side from my string, I'm about to plug in my heat gun.
This is the fun part because now it actually sounds like something's happening because
I get to use a big old freaking heat gun.
Heat gun is basically a high powered hairdryer that goes super hot and blows.
So I hope this works well and first, actually, I'm looking at my workspace and because I'm
so incredibly not paying attention, I just realized that if I do it like this, I won't
have anywhere to set my hand.
So I'm going to bring half of my hearty backer off of the block, I'm going to hold
my knife up against this and I'm going to grab myself a towel because a towel is about
as good as I'm going to get here on the floor of my kitchen.
Okay, ready to go, got my towel, got my heat gun, got my knife.
So I will grab my knife.
I do have a decent wooden handle on this knife so I'm expecting the center of it where
the tang of the blade comes down to get warm but not the knife itself.
Here we go.
Step number one, on knife and heat gun hold because I haven't run yet, we're going to see
how well this works.
It is these racks so I really shouldn't need incredibly hot nights.
We're just going to kind of gauge a little bit, I'm running my heat gun all the way up
the side, put my knife over, run it all the way up the side, trying to get it just the
edge of it really.
I don't want to hold it because most likely this thing is going to wobble and I go to
chop it and heat gun off, sit that down on my tiles, grab my knife, line up my marks and
first press go.
Well, I didn't let my knife quite get hot enough but okay, it starts working.
Here we go.
Heat gun on, I think I'm going to leave it here for a second, let the heat gun really
warm up.
I'm sure whoever was listening to this familiar heat gun was just saying, that ain't
working hard enough to get this hot, there's my hot, there's the crappy little fucking
heat gun.
This heat gun until yesterday really wasn't even operating, yesterday I decided that
I was going to try to build myself, my water filter prototype, I just got waxed and
I'm bored.
Well, that doesn't matter, I can deal with that, it's just a scrap board anyway.
So I built myself a water filter test, I fussed about the clay that I built from a good
recipe from the potters for these guys and the clay was a little too wet so I just smushed
the middle of the bucket and decided that I was going to use my heat gun to try to
cure it on the way up so I didn't have to roll a slab with my clay.
I could just utilize whatever it was that I wanted to utilize.
So here we go, step number two, press into the clay or into the wax, of course it's clay
to me.
And it seems to be melting, okay, this is such a large piece of what's going to take
it whole, actually warm, it's still moving so I'm going to keep going in a little bit.
I haven't quite gotten to it with my blade yet.
You guys needed an example, I'm going to flip this heat gun back on, keep blabbering
away, hose to heat gun and I'm going to spin this actually so I can melt my wax on
my ground paper here.
So I made this water filter, I pressed it, what I did is I took the soft clay that was
in the bucket, storing clay you want to keep it in a soft state, little softer than fully
workable if you're me anyway because it might be a year or two before you get to that piece
of clay.
This batch I made over three years ago, the reason I never utilized it, oh god, this
smells so incredibly good, it smells like honey, the reason I never utilized my clay is because
I'm going to have to fire it to such a low temperature that it doesn't actually burn
the charcoal out of my filter.
So my filter will be hopefully, it's just a prototype, hopefully it will have approximately
half an hour or half a gallon per hour, flow rate and it will also be impregnated with
activated charcoal.
That's going to be nice.
So I took my clay, I put a layer of newspaper in my bucket, smushed my clay into the
bucket, made sure it was thin, it was even and because my clay was so soft, it was difficult
to make sure it was even because I couldn't go all flat like I said, I used my heat gun
and for about six months my heat gun's been broken.
But I just had this feeling and I went down and I grabbed my heat gun and it was very
nice.
So here I go, third pressing of the blade into the block of beeswax and this section has
been edited for a future HPR show, now back to our wax.
This beeswax is definitely going to work, I'm about three or four inches down my block.
I think my episode is going to be done though because it's basically just going to be this
heat gun run in and I have a feeling it's going to take me a good solid 35, 40 minutes
to do it properly without making a giant mess.
Well I can't let my episode end that way, took me maybe 15 minutes, got my wax cut,
unfortunately I got a little overzealous on my pressure with my first split and didn't
score enough all the way around.
So I got some chipping, so my nice clean piece I don't get, he gets to nice clean pieces
and because of the way things were going I think I'm actually going to seal them together
since I got my heat gun and my knife out.
So it looks fucking gorgeous, there's this core in the middle of extra fluffy just like
mmm god it's so this wax is just sliced right off of the top of the honeycombs, takes
a big hot knife slices the caps off, sticks them in a spinner, spins the honey out and
has a drainer that he drained into afterwards just because he has so many they get sitting
there and there's always a little bit extra.
I remember when my uncle when I was younger had bees with his buddies and they'd go out
and they'd all collect their stuff and they'd spin them out but then they'd instantly
take their drawers and stick them back in the hives and he's he actually swaps the
hives out before or the slats and the drawers, so he goes he collects the drawers, sticks
a new drawer, sticks the queen back in the middle, there's a little more to it than that
but that's basically his operation.
My operation here though is done and I'm going to call this a success that I could not
have asked for when picking the propolis out of my frickin' honey, there's a significant
amount of honey left in, this wax is going to be used to make sobs, I'll make myself
a few, maybe that'll be another episode, seeing as I just did a double episode, I was thinking
I would just cut that out, my frickin' end lift babbling about frickin' cloppy, normally
I don't talk while I don't, especially don't talk about things off topic and I kind
of lose track of what I'm doing if I try to talk about something else, I mean right
now I can talk about talking and clean my knife and I'm doing it, but I wanted to say thanks
for everybody out there, I had a public read for the shows you've been doing, I listened
to them and I'm going to extend in the old Linux outlaws forums, I'm a potter as you
can tell, but since Dan and Fass Mug sent Jesu and I built a couple of mugs one time
of time, Jesu actually got the best, and I keep thinking about I sent him, it's slightly
squared off, probably holds, I don't know, 11 ounces or so, but me and that was one of my
favorite pieces at that point in time, those were my student lines, but I tried to send
my better ones out, my memory serves me, and I built a gotta, got a big old monkey grip
look and cut, I would like to extend the, like I said, offer that I once extended in
the forums to Lost in Bronx since he lives in my neighborhood as much as in my neighborhood
could be around here, that if he ever is in Flagstaff, stop on by, he can have a pot,
I got a mugs in here, anybody, you stop by, you find me, send me an email, I got pots,
so I think I'll leave my RAM lens in, seeing as RAM lens about what I'm doing, I got wax
cut, I got pictures going in the computer somehow, I'm gonna rescan that post on the message
on the email list about attaching other files so that I can get those up there properly,
but have a good day!
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