elanya

Man, my brain is work-fried today.

I am conserving some shoes that are in a very very sad state. Also one of them has a ridiculous number of rusty nails in the heel. By which I mean over 30. Oh gods, shoot me now.

Anyway, the thing to do is treat the leather first, so that is it a little more stable when I need to take out the nails (can you hear me crying yet?) and replace them, one at a time. D:

The way we treat most organic type stuff at the lab is to use silicone oil. If you've seen any of the Bodyworks displays with the plastinated corpses... that is the same thing. You impregnate whatever with the oil + a crosslinker (often under vacuum), then expose to a catalyst, and the oil turns to a solid plastic-y type material which has a shelf life of about 250 years.

So, silicone oil does weird things to leather - it reacts with certain natural amino acids, which polymerize the oil. And under vacuum, weirder things happen, and globs of yellow oil-impregnated goo (amino acid + oil + ???) gets pulled out of the leather, and polymerizes on the surface of the leather in little round balls.

So, then, I have to pick off all those tiny little weird yellow balls that have escaped from the pores of the leather... with a scalpel.... for hours...

So, my brain is work fried. This is unfortunate as I have crap I need to do tonight.

Perhaps a shower will help :x