Very OT: Brown "molasses" oozing from old furniture

Probably, but that was more than 100 years ago.

No smell at all. So far...

OOOOOkay, I'll take it. I'm always looking for some new material for the act.

Jim

-- "Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt, and dance like no one is watching." --Satchel Paige

...followed shortly by a nylon letdown.

It HAS happened, which is why we look at every airplane flying on an annual basis, to see if we can see anything funny going on. Sometimes, like in this instance, the flaw doesn't show up for a few dozen years.

Jim

-- "Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt, and dance like no one is watching." --Satchel Paige

Yeah, it's just that I thought stuff that is >100 years old does not exhibit such late pathologies. Like the Roman buildings in Germany that are all over 1500 years old and in top shape. Their arenas weren't deemed "worn out" after 25 years or so like ours. They built them so they'd not only take the beatings of the crowds but also to withstand

Is it the one about the last words of a redneck pilot?

(Hey y'all, watch me now!)

I tell it as, "Hey, y'all, hold my beer and watch THIS."

Jim

Sounds like a pitch pocket (sap that fills a crack in the living tree, which can come free due to minor ageing later).

Old glues (hide glue) usually fail by attack by fungus and turn to dust, or by shrinkage of wood and getting loose.

If you're sure it's a hardwood (they don't have the resinous sap, so are unlikely to form non-drying pockets), it could be part of an oil finish, the un-polymerized linseed oil from a hefty dose applied at the chairmaker's.

In either case, turpentine should dissolve it. Maybe try waterless hand cleaner for cleanup.

I am sure that it's hardwood. Considering the age it must certainly be an oil-based finish.

Yep, that's going to be the job now I guess. I was just so surprised that it was liquid, and even more so that it didn't harden after it had run down the wall a bit. Turpentine would be bad news though, meaning the wall needs to be re-done. Of course, as per Murphy's law, this is the highest wall in the whole place. So the big ladder has to come out for the paint job.

I've noticed that acrylic wall paint is porous and stains can be too deep to clean without destroying or burnishing the paint.. Clean, sand, prime and repaint. I recommend Bin 123 primer to block any remaining residue that might want to bleed out of the finish paint. D from BC

Wow, this could be really interesting... Probably the blood of the axe man who cut the tree, but who's axe slipped and he cut off his head!

Were this mine, first would be to see what the substance is souilable in... Water, solvent ('oil') or alchol are the first three things to try. That may help you narrow down what it is.

It could be the glue used to glue the joint...

Well, I did get it off the wall by now, carefully scraping with a knife.

Almost fixed now. Looks like some whitish rubbery material has mutated into a kind of chocolate. Very bizarre. But it's gone now.

HASH OIL!

Quite doubtful that the old man that made your furniture piece had so much hash oil (or any FTM) that he put a gob of it in your joint .

Top posting, Usenet retard.

I did, idiot. I wouldn't expect an idiot that insists on being a top posting Usenet idiot (TOFU Tard at that) to get it though.

If you are so stupid as to think that one could swing an axe in such a manner as to have it cut off one's head... you should try it. We need one less total retard in the world. I guarantee that your axe will not cut off your head, but the result I mentioned that we need might "befall" you. One can only hope.

Sadly we only see the ones that survived. Many more Roman buildings have vanished without trace. If you had asked them at the time, which ones were built to last, I expect they would have given you a very much longer list than the ones we know about.

There are so many factors involved in making things that last: The most durable recording medium for many years was thought to be metal masters

- no one considered their potential value to the scrap merchant. Where are the British Decca archives now?

Digitized, if we are lucky.

The only thing they could find when making the DVD release of the BBS movie "The Lathe of Heaven", based on Ursula Le Guinn's book, were old VHS copies they could round up, but that was the result of a fire at the archive building.

So half the movie looks different than the rest. Great flic, however, BTW.

The 'joke' here though, was that another type of adhesive (cassein-whey), was also commonly used, failed in a rather 'benign' manner when it aged, and got damp. It softened, and often got quite smelly (latter types had a fungicide to prevent this), but the glue underneath, retained good strengh, and loads transfered nice and smoothly to the deeper parts of the joint. This was used on the Mosquito, and several other WWII aircraft with timer components, and kept going remarkably well for years afterwards. Hide adhesives though can fail very nastily. In dry enviroments, they can go brittle, while if moisture/fungus is present, they can give a failure go into a fine powder mode..... I recently spent several months of evenings, helping dismantle every joint on two wing assemblies, cleaning out the old adhesive, and re-assembling these. Most of the 'upper' joints (where presumably some solar heating had taken place), had gone brittle, while some of the lower ones had gone into the 'powder' mode. The wings were modified from ones supplied by AVRO, in the mid 1920's. However none had gone into 'gunge', but a couple of locations where presumably a knot had been removed, and tehre was a sap pocket, showed behaviour like this.

Best Wishes