Your cart is empty.
Your cart is empty.The Alcohol lamp has lasted as an inexpensive and viable way to heat woodwind pad cups when removing and installing pads. Although it is not portable, the alcohol lamp will keep functioning when torches fail. In our shop we use this exact alcohol lamp when a low temperature flame is required, usually during Clarinet and Flute repair.
Customer
Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2021
How difficult is it to make an alcolohol lamp? Not very difficult, I would have thought. But this simplistic device by MusicMedic.com is very disappointing. The wick is extremely hard to scroll up or down, and at times simply refuses to move at all. The metal top assembly has a gasket inside, presumably to minimize leakage, but it's not very effective, and if the top is screwed VERY gently, just enough so that it feels like the gasket is being compressed a little, it's impossible to unscrew without a cap-removal gadget. If you're not careful, the slender shaft of the wick knob will get seriously bent in the process.Alcohol is of course very thin, and easily seeps through even tightly crimped metal joints, and the top assembly is no exception -- alcohol easily leaks out from every seam (all of which are crimped, and none of which have gaskets. The little metal cup that us used to snuff out the flame and protect the wick from evaporation is very loose, and doesn't actually FIT the wick holder -- it just sits loosely on top and flattens the end of the wick a bit.But the worst failing is that the wick itself simply doesn't work. It's a very tight weave that fits through the top assembly only with difficulty, and I've seen very little evidence of alcohol being brought to the top end of the wick by capillary action. I've had the bottle half full of 91% isopropyl alcohol, which burns very nicely when a puddle of it is lit, for hours, and the top of the wick is almost dry. I've tried adding more alcohol to the top of the wick, hoping it would seep down the wick for some distance, but when lit the alcohol flame dies down in a minute or so, leaving the wick itself to burn without the help of the fuel.My hope is that some other wick may work -- a looser weave, a more absorbent material, and a slightly reduced diameter might allow it to be raised and lowered, and might also allow it act as a wick. The supplied wick is simply non-functional.This is a long review for something that's fundamentally INCREDIBLY SIMPLE. But there are so many things about this product that are inferior or non-functional that I'm rather amazed. It's as if someone engaged a factory to build something that LOOKS LIKE an alcohol lamp, but has never been tested or actually used for that purpose.If the wick were any good I still would have given it only 2 stars, though. It's a pretty dismal failure all around.
Recommended Products
$34.99
$ 15 .99 $15.99