[SEL] belt dressing, now damar

[John Culp]

It's a fossil resin dug out of the ground in Africa, as is copal. Kind 
of like amber. All of these have been dug and ground up by the 
thousands of tons to make old fashioned oil varnish, before the 
development of the synthetic resins. For varnish, they're molten and 
blended with drying oils like linseed and thinned with turpentine or 
mineral spirits. Castor oil, with which the damar was to be mixed in 
the belt dressing recipe, gets sticky and gummy but never dries the way 
boiled linseed oil does. Raw linseed oil stays gummy and would likely 
be a good substitute for castor oil, which has gotten hard to find in 
bulk these days. Rosin would be a direct substitute for damar for this 
purpose.

John Culp
Bristol, Tennessee, USA