Forums > Technical Discussion > Poi wick cages

Posted: 8th Feb 2003
basicly you straighten out a coat hanger. You cut the towel into strips as wide as you want your wicks to be. I find two strips per poi head are a good amount. You start wrapping the towel around the coat hanger. Make sure the towel is being wrapped straight and that there is no creases in it. In addition make sure the towel is wrapped reasonably tight. When you come to the end of the strip you take the end of the next strip and unravel the first strip one rotation, place the new strip underneath what you just unravled. Then you re-ravel the first strip over the send, then wrap the second around till it runs out of wick. When you come to the end you can use tuck it in a little bit at the bottom of the role aswell as glue it with elmers/white glue (A hair drier will dry our elmbers glue in a few minutes).

Now make sure your rolled up towel is in the middle of the straightened out coat hanger and bend one end of the coat hanger 180 degree's so it is pointing the same direction as the other end. This is what forms the "cage". You then take the longest end (the one that has not been bent) and make a loop shape with it. You don't want the loop to be very big, jus tbig enough to hook your chains onto. Coil all the excess coat hanger around it's self and also coil the other end around the other coat hanger end.

Im not sure if that makes any sense but there you go.

Posted: 9th Feb 2003
Cheers, the instructions are really clear. I'm pretty sure that's the way the article I mentioned used. How well does this keep towel together? Do you get much towel flying off after a few burns?

J

If you're not confused, you're not thinking about things hard enough.

Posted: 9th Feb 2003
The only thing I've noticed is that if you brush your clothing even the slightest amount (baggy pants or whatnot) then embers will fly but I haven't burned one towel wick enough times to see the degredation first hand. If you do burn them lots (15-20 times, depending on how it was constructed) they will disintegrate.

Posted: 11th Feb 2003
There is a great description of how to make terry-towel wicks at:

https://www.geocities.com/firepoi/construction.html

However, I have had similar experiences to the author: I'm lucky to get 3-4 burns from a set of terry-towel wicks. It is also important to note that you *must* extinguish them with a wet towel as the fuel burns out. If you don't, they will desintegrate the first time you burn them. It is also important to know that they will continue to smoulder *long* after they are extinguished, and while they are smouldering the material is also desintegrating. The only way to stop them from smouldering is to dunk them in water or pure kerosene/lamp oil. *NEVER* resoak terry wicks in anything containing white gas or charcoal fluid or you will almost certainly set your fuel dump on fire.

Those are the things that you can control. What you can't control are the little bits of towel that go flying when you spin them. If you are gonna use terry towel, be very careful that this is going to happen.

As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of terry-towel wicks. They are convenient if you happen to be doing a lot of travel and don't want to worry about losing a set of good kevlar wick. For general use, though, it is really worth the $10 - $15 bucks to splurge on some kevlar wick.

-p.

Posted: 14th Feb 2003
Thanks for the safety info and the site, pj; that was the exact one I had in mind in my first post!
I decided to learn to make my own wicks because in about 6 months time, I shall be travelling all over, and I don't particularly want to fork out £15 for a new set of wicks for every country I'm going to visit, especially as I'm probably only going to get a few burns out of each set. Denim wicks seemed to be the best way to go, and I thought I had better figure out exactly how to make the wicks before I went.

J

If you're not confused, you're not thinking about things hard enough.