Quick & dirty salad oil lamp

Rationale

With the Zombie Apocalypse being imminent, you should be prepared for your role as Omega Man, especially at night.

Seriously, even if it's not zombies or some other catastrophe: knowing how to build a light source from scrap materials might come in handy at times.

Because of this (and, chiefly, because I was quite bored this evening *g*) I decided to try building a simple oil lamp with just some items I had lying around without googling about how to do it beforehand – I just wanted to tinker around for myself.

Building

Surprisingly, this was easier than I anticipated. I grabbed a shot glass, a plain paper tissue and some aluminium foil. I used my sunflower oil usually needed for cooking as fuel for the lamp.

First, I ripped off a small strip (about 3 cm wide) from the paper tissue. With the tissue strip being much too high (about 20 cm) for my shot glass I ripped off the larger part of my strip so that it was only some centimeters higher than the shot glass. Then I twisted one end of the strip to make it round-ish, like a thick cord – the wick is finished.

After that I folded the aluminium foil multiple times (as I tore off way too much from the roll) to create a strip of about 2 cm width. I pinched a hole into the middle of the strip wide enough to plunge the previously-made paper tissue wick through it. I pressed and twisted this aluminium foil wick holder a little to make sure the wick won't slip out later and put the whole holder&wick-construction over the shot glass.

Lastly I poured some oil into the shot glass, waited until the tissue was fully oil-soaked and lit the top with a lighter:

It worked! At night it shines like a candle:

Conclusion

It's very easy building such a lamp – in case you have nothing else at hand, you'll have hours of light at night using just a tissue, some container to hold salad oil and something to keep the tissue wick dipped into the oil. Just perfect for when you're the last survivor of a zombie apocalypse :)