While you can melt the remaing honey when you get done, it would be a shame to heat it when you don't need to. I've used everything from nylon window screen to nylon cloth to cheescloth for a strainger. The window screen works fine. What wax gets through, which won't be much, will rise tothe top and can be skimmed off with a sheet of saran wrap. I tend to put the saran wrap on a paper plate and eat the honey with the wax myself. :)
It's really a simple and messy process. But then so is extracting. You are already using whatever you'r using, but for crush and strain I would use starter strips or unwired wax or some kind of foundationless. If you already have plastic foundation it will be a little more work to scrape the combs off the foundation and you'll need to rig some way to drain the frames because they will have a lot of honey on them. If you have wax, you can just cut the sombs out and squisth them. I leave the top row at least half on so the bees will have a good starting point for the next comb.
You'll need a double bucket strainer. They are easy to make. Here's some pictures:
http://bwrangler.atspace.com/bee/thar.htmI just mash the combs with my hands.
Here's what Richard Taylor says about wax and honey and extractors:
Richard Taylor on Comb Honey:
"A comb honey beekeeper really needs, in addition to his bees and the usual apiary equipment and tools, only one other thing, and that is a pocket knife. The day you go into producing extracted honey, on the other hand, you must begin to think no only of an extractor, which is a costly machine used only a relatively minute part of the year, but also of uncapping equipment, strainers, settling tanks, wax melters, bottle filling equipment, pails and utensils galore and endless things. Besides this you must have a place to store supers of combs, subject to damage by moths and rodents and, given the nature of beeswax, very subject to destruction by fire. And still more: You must begin to think in terms of a whole new building, namely, a honey house, suitably constructed, supplied with power, and equipped....
"All this seems obvious enough, and yet time after time I have seen novice beekeepers, as soon as they had built their apiaries up to a half dozen or so hives, begin to look around for an extractor. It is as if one were to establish a small garden by the kitchen door, and then at once begin looking for a tractor to till it with. Unless then, you have, or plan eventually to have, perhaps fifty or more colonies of bees, you should try to resist looking in bee catalogs at the extractors and other enchanting and tempting tools that are offered and instead look with renewed fondness at your little pocket knife, so symbolic of the simplicity that is the mark of every truly good life."
Richard Taylor on the expense of making wax:
"The opinion of experts once was that the production of beeswax in a colony required great quantities of nectar which, since it was turned into wax, would never be turned into honey. Until quite recently it was thought that bees could store seven pounds of honey for every pound of beeswax that they needed to manufacture for the construction of their combs--a figure which seems never to have been given any scientific basis, and which is in any case quite certainly wrong. The widespread view that if the combs were used over and over, through the use of the honey extractor, then the bees would be saved the trouble of building them and could convert the nectar thus saved into honey, was only minimally correct. A strong colony of bees will make almost as much comb honey as extracted honey on a strong honey flow. The advantage of the extractor, in increasing harvests, is that honey stored from minor flows, or gathered by the bees over many weeks of the summer, can easily be extracted, but comb honey cannot be easily produced under those conditions."
from The Comb Honey Book, by Richard Taylor
To put it in perspective, yes, if you have a farm you should buy a tractor. If you have a little postage stamp garden you should buy a shovel. If you have fifty hives you need an extractor unless you have a market for that much comb honey. If you have one or two hives, it's a waste of time and money. Taylor had hundreds of hives and no extractor and made a nice living selling honey.