Oozing Goo - The Lava Lamp Syndicate

So I've got this clear/red 2005 52-oz. China lamp that I picked up during an episode of poor eBay impulse control.  I'm not too proud of it, but I'm not ashamed of it either; the flow is actually pretty nice for a China lamp, and it's quite clear, which was a happy surprise.

 

About the only thing actually wrong with it is a bunch of crud in the wax.  Looks to be mostly black coil-corrosion crud (right, needs a new coil, too; on it) but there's also some icky-looking white stuff that is definitely NOT just clumps of the Ol' Mystery Powder.  The closest resemblance that comes to mind would be some sort of insect-chrysalis; fine white tendrils of fibrous matter, which frankly look more biological in origin than chemical, although for the life of me I can't think of any organism, micro- or otherwise, that would produce this stuff AND could survive inside a hermetically-sealed lamp full of all sorts of semi-volatile hydrocarbons.  But that's really neither here nor there .... bottom line, there's crud in my goo, and I want it out.

 

I'm thinking that running it through some fine metal mesh (perhaps a "permanent" coffee filter, or maybe a cheap frying-pan splatter-guard, or something like that) would do the trick nicely, and that I should be able to minimize goo-loss by subsequently melting any residual goo off the mesh with a hair dryer.

 

Any thoughts/advice/related-experiences, folks?  And has anyone ever found cobweb-looking stuff in their lamps, or should I maybe give up on this plan due to a lack of Level 4 Biohazard PPE?  I don't like crud in my goo, but I don't want to give myself the plague trying to clean it out ....

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I had a couple of GooKit'd lamps that had some of this stuff in it. One had a black fuzzy mass and another had some white fuzzies. Looked like a kind of mold. However, obviously, both lamps had been open since I had GooKit'd each one of them.


Here's what mine looked like:

http://oozinggoo.ning.com/forum/topics/gookit-lamps-with-mold-or


I don't know that I'd mess with it unless you're really attached to this lamp. The fuzzy stuff in the water might be easy enough to get out, but the crud in the wax will be difficult. I have several lamps with little brown flakes in them and most of the time when they're running, you don't see them. 

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