I’d always wondered why the previous occupant had used atypical/nonstandard repairs to some trivial drains.

I mean, these things are only hand-tight.

To their credit, it didn’t leak at all. At all.

Right, so, let’s start to disassemble and make it right…

Nine FEET of electrical tape later…

Wait, there’s more electrical tape?

Honestly, that nut is quite loose now that the majority of the tape is removed.

Yep. And it’ turned out that

• the tailpiece (the metal pipe shown) was glued into the wye underneath of it
• and the nut was glued onto the wye and
• the upper nut had another type of electrical tape (yellow this time) wrapped around it two or three times

I suppose they had gone to all of that work to try stopping what was thought to be a leak. But the actual issue was that the the upper nut was simply not screwed onto the basket above it.

So, I just replaced the parts that I simply didn’t want to clean glue off of.