Cleaning up a bass (Peavey Fury '94) Need help w/ questions

1. Rust on removables: CLR is o.k. Make sure to rinse well and dry immediately. A hair dryer will help. Additional rubbing on a stiff carpet will maintain the vintage look to the screw.
   
2. Frets: 0000 steel wool. Mask off the fingerboard and pickups with tape or use StewMac fret guards. Or mask fingerboard and pickups and use an abrasive pad. Either will work fine.
3. Maple neck: Windex on a rag, rag on fingerboard, fingernails in rag where frets meet fingerboard. Or use naphtha first and follow with Windex.

Polish or wax is up to you.

 

Steel wool is good for polishing frets, but, before using it, be sure to tape off your PICKUPS, because the steel wool with throw off zillions of little bits of steel, and they will be attracted to the magnets in the pickups. If the pickups are taped off, the metal fuzz can be removed before it gets into the pickups. Or, I often unscrew the pickup mounting screws and put them in a sandwich bag and seal the top around the wires.

 

Anytime there is steel wool on the guitar, just use another piece of tape "adhesive on top of the steel wool shreds" to pick up the remaining shreds with the adhesive side of the tape.

The steel wool shards can be evasive sometimes!

I sometimes use 2000 grit sandpaper before 0000 steel wool too.

 

A magnet can also be handy for picking up little bits of steel wool. I have an old speaker magnet that I stick to the side of my workbench and use for just that purpose.

 

Just don't use the magnet to clean up the steel wool shreds around your pickups. You can easily wreck the magnetic structure of the pickups doing that.

 

Best to keep steel wool away from something that uses uses magnets, like bass and light string guitars, since there are alternatives.
Scotch pads work great, and fingernail shaper/buffer/polisher combos to do the finishing touches.
And as posted above, keep magnets away from other magnets if you want to keep the values the same.
Please post some px when you've got it back together.

 

I was the one who got the Fury as a christmas gift.
Wow! What a bass.
Came across the thread and saw she didnt leave a pic so here it is.
She put chrome knobs on with a custom made pickguard and cleaned it up nicely.

 

Yeah, That's nice!
Thanks for sharing...