Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2007-02-01 12:05
>>Don't immerse it with soap or water. >>
In general, I agree with that advice--and I'd never use soap on a clarinet. I've been using Murphy's. But, for the wooden instrument that's gotten truly filthy, I do sometimes put the sections under lukewarm water, for a brief period of time--with the keys, rods and screws removed first. (I wash those separately.) I never *soak* a clarinet in the water. I only put it under long enough to get it clean.
To avoid damaging the wood, I've modified a couple of bore brushes, thick and thin, by sewing flannel sacks. Each sack fits very loosely over the bottle-brush and the rod that's made of twisted metal. The tip of the sack is extra-thick so that no hard tip of the bottle brush can scratch the inside of the clarinet bore. The sack turns the brush into something that works more like a dishrag. It's easy to remove the sacks and throw them in the laundry after the innards of a clarinet dirty them up. I think this procedure, which lifts most grime quickly, is actually less rough on the clarinet than scrubbing, and scrubbing, and scrubbing with a damp brush. When I'm done, I make sure the clarinet is very thoroughly dry, inside and out, before oiling it and then getting to work on the keys and putting everything back together.
By the way, Bill Weaver, proprietor of Weaver's Violins, the oldest violin restoration business in the Washington, D. C. area, sold my husband a print of a wonderful 19th century etching of a man walking into his house and, with a look of extreme horror on his face, catching his housekeeper in the act of scrubbing his cello, in a washtub full of suds! Bill told Kevin the dirty little secret: Yes, of course, a prolonged soak can destroy a wooden instrument, but when he finds one that's in "grandpa's basement" condition, with ancient, blackened rosin clotted all over the belly, he does put the disassembled fiddle underwater to clean it. We're talking about fiddles worth tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars here. That's one reason why I don't panic too much about dunking a filthy old clarinet.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
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Post Edited (2007-02-01 12:12)
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The Clarinet BBoard
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