Lemon oil

My Gibson's rosewood fret board was getting as dry as a dead dingo's donger.

Last week I restrung it with some nice coated EB slinkys but as the board was so dry they felt like rusted barbed wire.

Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating just a tiny bit here but it got to a point where it just didn't feel right anymore.

I've been reading about oiling fret boards with all kinds of stuff: 'lemon oil', 'mineral oil', olive oil (yes, olive oil), etc but the most common advice was getting some lemon oil.

I'm not big into DIY stuff and had no idea what lemon oil actually is so I went to a DIY store.

People working there had absolutely no idea what I was on about and as I didn't know what it actually was I wasn't going to buy just anything.

Instead of going on a rant about inaccurate and incomplete advice given out on message boards on the intertubes I turned to my local music store's website and there I saw some Dunlop 65 ultimate lemon oil.

That's right, ultimate lemon oil, not just regular lemon oil, _ultimate_ lemon oil; the only thing missing is a '2000' or '5000' at the end of that name.

Again, a long story short: I bought some, applied it to the fret board and these are my findings:

Pro:

* It's easy to use and dose because of the applicator.

* It cleans the grime and grease pretty well.

* The wood got (what I assume is) its natural color back.

* Fret board feels much smoother and is much more enjoyable to play on.

Con:

* It smells funny.

* It's like everything smells like funny at least 2 hours after using it.

* My guitar's fret board now (the day after) smells funny.

* I don't want my guitars to smell funny.

Did I mention yet it smells funny? No? Well, it does; smells funny, that is.

The reason I'm going on about this is that I don't even think there's actual lemon extract in it, it smells nothing like the lemon extract bottle I keep in the fridge.

It smells like Cymbopogon, the Citronella stuff my mom soaked me in with 25 years ago when I was little right before bed time during summers.

I never really liked the smell of it and it didn't keep mosquitoes at bay at all but to be honest, my mom couldn't have known because it was only in 2002 a study (8th paragraph in the article) concluded the stuff is effective for about 20 minutes.

Anyways, one night the bottle started to leak in the drawer of the end table next to my bed so that drawer reeked for years to come.

Smell memories are funny that way, cleaning a fret board took me back 25 years; another smell that really fucks me up is cherry blossoms but that's another story and totally irrelevant now.

But yeh, the fret board: it's stunning now and I took a before and after shot for your amusement.