I was considering making an oil lamp as a gift for a friend. I didn’t know much about lamps. I experimented with olive oil and different wick fabrics.  Wick material was important for a successful lamp, but wick management proved to be even more critical. Wick burns very slowly because largely the oil is burned in place of the wick. But over time the wick needs “trimming”. You need a simple way to advance the wick up out of the oil so that it can continue to burn.  Lacking good tools for making an advancing mechanism that was elegant and simple to use I bought an oil lamp that already had one as a base for my project.