Neck cleaning...Murphy's 3:1 or 1:3??

[adouglas]

Okay, here ya go

For some reason, the flash makes the neck grunge go away. I've included one room-light (fuzzy) photo, but it still doesn't look like the real thing.

I've got a maple coffee table, and when I put the guitar on it, the neck looks *really* gray.

Doesn't really matter...it sounds great, plays great and is very cool. It'd be nice to have a clean neck, but I've always maintained that it's MUCH more important to sound good than to look good!

LOVE that birdseye...makes me want to eat my vegetables! (Note for those of you outside the US...that's a ref to Clarence Birdseye, inventor of frozen vegetables...his name became a brand.)

 

[candid_x]

I think that strings wear through the oil/wax finish and dirt collects easier on the unfinished wood directly below the strings. You can clean the dirt off with fine steel wool (or with other methods) but the dullness you see is unfinished wood. You can oil/wax it again, but it won’t perfectly blend with the already oil-finished wood. The result is (and only when looked at closely) a stripe effect along the lines of the strings. I think that to get the finish completely even, you’d have to start from scratch: wool or sand the entire fretbord aggressively until all finish was completely gone, and then apply new oil/wax as recommended by EB. But the same thing would only happen again after some playing time on it. It’s just the nature of this type of finish, which I’d choose any day over glossy "skiddy" maple planks.

Maple is very hard with tight pores, and it doesn't 'drink' in oil as easily many other woods do.

 

[adouglas]

That makes a lot of sense.