Advice on Cleaning

[stinky634]

I followed the method posted a while back using lemon oil and a sponge (the rough green side) to clean my fret board on my LX. What I didnt notice until after it all dried up, is that the new Warwick neck fretboards have a certain shine to them, and that green sponge roughed it up, to where it has a few "scuffs" in the fret board finish. Meaning, the scuffs made parts of the wood flats looking with no shine, and looks a little abused.

On my Vette, it was already worn and old that it took this method fine.

So I am about to give my LX a good cleaning again, and wanted to know if I should go at it again with the sponge and rough it up evenly, OR try something else to bring back the polished look?

 

[tEyEn]

I have a similar problem but am less informed! I need to give my secondhand FNA a dee clean to get rid of previous owner's grime- I can see polishing the body & washing up liquid for the plastics, but the neck is problem. How do I get ingrained sebum out of ovangkol and wenge?

 

[DiMarco]

There's lots of threads on the forum about this guys.

 

[markoism]

first use the right liquid or wax for the bass but I usually use a ripped fabric from a 100% cotton t-shirt for the cleaning. I have been doing it for 7 years and I never had a problem with it. Keep in mind I have a different piece for each type of liquid. Never use the same for all different ones.

 

[stinky634]

So my real question never got answered, I know how to clean the bass, the problem is now the fret board 'shine' isnt even, and I would like to bring it back. Would waxing it help, or make things funky for the strings?

If I cant rbing the shine back, I could just rough up the rest evenly, but I'd rather not if I dont have to.

thanks in advance.

 

[Florin]

I would not wax the fingerboard, I don't like the feel of wax on the neck and fb.

Dunlop Fingerboard Kit have a special cloth for this, that it is actually an ultra fine, rubbery sandpaper. Try that

 

[Gastrok]

I would not wax my fretboard on any kind of regular basis, but if I wanted to return them to that shiny factory fresh look I think you would want to wax it and then buff the hell out it. Clean it with lemon oil first, of course, followed by a fret shining with 0000 steel wool (use masking tape on wood between frets).

just my $0.02

 

[stinky634]

I would not wax the fingerboard, I don't like the feel of wax on the neck and fb.

Dunlop Fingerboard Kit have a special cloth for this, that it is actually an ultra fine, rubbery sandpaper. Try that

Thanks!!! Finally got the Kit, and sampled the paper on a small section of wood, and it definitely is bringing back the shine. Will do the rest when I can afford some new strings. EMP's aint cheap.

Also, on the back of the paper it says 8000, which Im guessing is 8000 grit sandpaper, for future reference.

 

[stinky634]

Update:

The polishing paper didn't exactly work that great after all. It didnt really shine anything, but did manage to get at least some of the ugliness of the rough spots out, but the paper wore out too fast to be of much use after a few sections between the frets.

If I had a ton more paper it might work better, but with what I had to work with, it wasn't enough. I did manage to get on some EMP's though, very very different from Elixirs, gonna take a while to get used to.

 

[Eberbachl]

I have used Stewart McDonalds Micro Mesh cloths to bring an ebony board to a lovely shine after levelling.

The reason your 8000 grit paper didn't work is that you have to move progressively through the grit range. You can't just hit it with a scouring pad then expect 8000 grit paper to remove those scratches and bring back a shine.

when I recently leveled an ebony fretless board with I used a radius sanding block (20"), fitted with 120 grit paper to get the board leveled and properly radiues to begin with then moved through the following grit ranges to finish (all on the radius block of course (very important)):

240
400
600
800
1200
1500
1800
2400
3200
3600
4000
6000
8000

This smoothed out the board nicely and brought back a lovely shine to it.