One of the things I know Mouse is going to need for her Life of Plants study is a lab tray for holding specimens while she dissects them. I bought a dissection kit for her at last year’s HEAV convention but I hadn’t gotten around to solving the problem of a tray until this morning.
One of the requirements for a lab tray is that the dissector be able to fasten the specimen to it in some way. Since I had a bunch of old candle ends around I decided to just fill an appropriate container with melted wax so that we could stick pins into the wax to hold whatever we were working on.
Here are the four easy steps to making your own DIY Wax lab tray!
As you can see this is a super simple project. Once the tray has been used for a while and has many pin holes in it, it can be re-smoothed by pouring a new thin layer of was over it or by remelting the whole thing!
That is the coolest thing! Thanks for sharing. I love this idea – I wonder if you could use it for other things as well – I know we have done the golf pegs into Styrofoam, but this would be less message and reusable too.
thanks – Michelle
If you poured the wax into something flexible (a shoebox lid?) you could pop the slab of wax out of it and then use it for practicing carving or for a unit study on The Fertile Crescent (they used wax tablets to write on)…K
Is there any reason this wouldn’t be idea for frog dissections?
I think this would work fine for frog dissections. You would just want to heat it and smooth the wax again when you were done.
I recommend that you use black or other dark colored candle wax. The pans need to be remelted periodically to provide a smooth working surface and a light colored wax looks nasty after many remelts!
NEVER MELT WAX OVER AN OPEN FLAME!
(Former college laboratory director)
This is great! I needed a surface to have pins in for a lesson on ellipses. This is a super easy to have something on-hand and yet it can be broken apart for storage! Just put the wax candle ends (whatever color) into a large baking sheet with foil or parchment covering the bottom, stick it into the oven at 250 and let it melt! Awesome!