Today was my last day of summer vacation. I am pretty depressed about this, although I should go start earning money again - I don't get a paid vacation after all!

I worked in brief bits of time today, since I had a fair pile of errands to run.

I set the neck in the car for about an hour today. The relief in the neck has decreased, and it is getting straighter. There is still about 1/40" relief in the middle, though, so I might flatten it a bit more.

I took the shoes off with a pair of open-end wrenches. They came off pretty easily.

I started cleaning with Quick Glo. You can probably tell which side I have already done.

Okay, DON'T DO THIS, but I spilled a bit of Quick Glo on the wood in the hoop. I wiped it off quickly, and noticed that the finish was really clean where I wiped it. I did a test in a discrete location (where the dowel stick covers the inside of the hoop) and found that Quick Glo did NOT hurt the finish, but did a great job cleaning off the incredibly difficult gunk on the finish. DON'T do this - you might have a different finish, or a different batch of Quick Glo, or who knows what. But I did it, and it worked beautifully.

The tailpiece and stretcher are looking a lot better too.

More cleaning of the neck. I used a pipe cleaner to get in those though spots with some naptha. I also spent about ten minutes cleaning the fretboard with naptha, and another 20 cleaning the rest of the neck with naptha.

Much better. Wow.

But - oh man, that is a lot of hardware to clean. No way will I be scrubbing every single hook, shoe, and bolt.

I discovered that the ebony fretboard is thinner in the middle of the neck than on the ends. I also found that several frets are not set very well - I'll get those the next time I make a pot of hide glue.
My apologies for the penguin bedspread. I work outside under a shade on a metal table, and I try to keep things clean.