It is not often that I undertake the job of thoroughly cleaning a soundboard (when the strings are still on) but today's Yamaha C3D needed a good swabbing. Near as I can tell, some little animal upchucked on about half of the area under the strings from dampers to tenor bridge, even got some overspray on the tuning pins but spared the action, thankfully. Since I haven't carried a soundboard steel for quite a while (yeah, right, I'm going out to the shop to get it right after this post), I was caught a little off guard but requested a bowl of warm soapy water and some soft rags and got started cleaning what I could reach. After a while, the customer brought out a whole box of Q-tips and also some larger swabbing type devices I'd never seen before called Ora-Swab, no doubt used in dentistry. They consisted of a small block of sponge about 1/2 x 5/8 x 1" long stuck on the end of a 6-inch, thick-walled plastic tube which worked very well to clean under the strings, ala Spurlock's soundboard tools only much more absorbent. She gave me a few of them to put in my kit but I thought that since they weren't made to reach, for example, the unreachable area under the bass strings (I had to pry strings apart quite a bit) that one could make a similar absorbent part by cutting up a sponge into different shapes and sizes and gluing them onto longer pieces of tubing. The resulting tools would not scratch the SB finish and would be suitable for plain old dust or could be used wet for spills. -- Thomas A. Cole RPT Santa Cruz, CA
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