General Maintenance

[BrettM]

What does everyone do in terms of care for their guitars? I wipe mine down with the fine lint free cloth each time, but the surface is starting to feel a little dry. How often should I polish? Do you recommend the care kits on the Gibson website? I'm in Australia and the shop where I bought from doesn't stock the kits, so is there another type of polish I can use on my LP's?

[SteveFord]

Buff the fret board with lemon oil every once in a while and perhaps a carnauba automotive wax for the rest?

[kidblast]

Look up Virtuoso Cleaner and Virtuoso Polish.

 

It's just about the best there is, and totally nitro safe.

 

For the fret board, check out "Guitar Honey"

 

(these should be avail. on Amazon,..)

[Surreal For Real]

I oil the fret board monthly and use Dunlop polish elsewhere every two weeks. I also keep my guitars out of direct sunlight. If you place them in the same spot and the sun spends some time on them, they will fade, crack, etc. And if I know I won't be playing one of them for some time, I put it back into it's case.

[retrorod]

To be quite honest, being a vintage enthusiast, and acquiring Gibson's with 30-50 years of stuff on them, I go through a very time-consuming ,but enjoyable cleaning regiman with different degrees of abrasive and then polishing compounds and cleaners, to get to the original lacquer finishing! At that point, almost any (non-silicone) guitar polish will do.

I clean the fingerboard with naptha followed by Howards Feed N Wax after every re-string (2-3 a year). My guitars are not that active these days and tend to stay cleaner than a gigging musician's with one axe!