NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Voyaging the traditional way
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2004 Oct 31, 23:44 +0000
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2004 Oct 31, 23:44 +0000
Fine old tales aside, does anyone know how to make or where to buy
tallow? It is available as a commercial product but my searching of the
Web has only yielded manufacturer's pages and they only sell in
wholesale quantities. It ought to be possible to make small quantities,
maybe of low quality, at home from beef fat but I am not sure of what
treatment is required. Boiling the beef in water and scooping off
whatever floats to the surface, perhaps? (Tallow is not simply fat,
which will go rancid and stink. It is a chemically-inert product -- a
"steroid", I think. The right application of heat to fat should convert
it into tallow but I don't know what treatment is "right".)
It would be nice to arm the lead (strictly a "bronze" in my case) with
the real thing but I need it more to lubricate the leather-covered jaws
of my boat's gunter spar so that they slide on the mast with a bit less
noise.
Trevor Kenchington
--
Trevor J. Kenchington PhD Gadus@iStar.ca
Gadus Associates, Office(902) 889-9250
R.R.#1, Musquodoboit Harbour, Fax (902) 889-9251
Nova Scotia B0J 2L0, CANADA Home (902) 889-3555
Science Serving the Fisheries
http://home.istar.ca/~gadus
