Thanks for all of your reports. I couldn’t get Doc Farwell’s for less than $75 for a GALLON and $35? shipping. I couldn’t get Gashell either, so I followed your advice and made mine DIY. I bought the toilet wax and a pound of beef fat at the butcher and waited for the resin in the mail.
The powdered resin came in last night, so I did the experiment today. I started to heat up the beef fat, which was in almost all of the recipes I saw. Then I realized that this was a bad idea. I am cooking big white globs of fat until the grease comes out of them. It’s going to take a long time. What I need is rendered fat, where the whole thing will turn into liquid grease when heated. Walmart was the only store that I saw that had it. They had less than a pound of beef tallow for $14. A local Mexican butchery/deli has 1 lb. of manteca, pig fat, for $4. Sold. So much cheaper than the tallow from Walmart. Tallow or manteca is already rendered. It’s so much easier to deal with.
I had an old burner, pot, and cheap double boiler set up. It’s a tuna can with water and another can inside. I put both into the cooking pot. I put the manteca(pig lard) in the double boiler can, and heated it up. Then I added the powdered resin when the fat was liquid and hot. That seemed to help it dissolve. It stays sticky and apart from the liquid if it’s not hot enough. I decided to use glass jars, because I wanted something with a tight lid to store it in afterwards, so it wouldn’t dry out. I cut up the toilet ring wax and left it in the jars. I put the hot grease from the cooking beef fat into the double boiler can too, so it was mostly pig lard with some beef grease. I dropped the hot resin/fat mixture into the wax in the jars. It didn’t melt right away. I stirred it and it slowly started to melt. I continued to chop it up and stir it. I added a bit of wood glue to one jar, as that was recommended on some of the DIY pages. I also added a bit of clay to one of the jars to see the effect. I got out some biochar, as some recipes recommended charcoal. I hadn’t crushed it yet, so I’m going to crush it before I add it.
As the jars cooled and neared ambient temperature, they seemed to mix better and solidify a bit. I had to add a lot more wax as the process went on. I just checked it about an hour ago and the texture was pretty good: halfway between a soft solid and liquid. Today was only step one: to see if I could make something close to Doc Farwell’s. It’s pretty close in color and texture, but not nearly as uniform. For Doc Farwell’s, I have to buy a whole gallon of DIY for $75 and 30 bucks for shipping, and this is way cheaper, so that’s a good start.
I am going to go to step 2 soon: Seeing if it will actually work when I graft something. That might happen tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted.
John S
PDX OR