Last night I was playing a bit while making supper.  Frying up some taters to make slumgullion and making some pancakes involves a certain amount of standing around watching, so I was passing the time by working on a few bits on the violin/fiddle while i was at the stove making supper for my family.

I got to thinking about assorted websites and etc that say not to even touch the bow hair because the oils from even clean hands may mess up the bow hairs.  My instrument spends quite a bit of time these days lying on it's gig bag on the kitchen table so I can pick it up when I have a few minutes to play a little.  I've never been much on doing one practice session a day and then putting the instrument away.  Most of my instruments sit in corners or on stands where they are easy to grab and play on whenever the mood or an idea strikes.

So far I don't think I have noted any great problems with the bow from particles of airborne cooking grease, but it seems that logically it could be a problem eventually.  I usually wipe off the bow hairs and stick with a scrap of silk when I wipe down the violin before I put it away when I am going to sleep. 

I am assuming that if it ever did start to persistently skip on one or more spots, I could spot-clean it with an alcohol pad and see if that fixed it.  Or is there some reason that would be a bad idea?

NV: Slumgullion is just diced potatoes and onions fried up and then you scramble eggs into it and cook it up all together.  It is a dish I learned from my step-father years ago who said he learned to make it back when he worked as a logger in Oregon.  We don't put that in the pancakes though, we have it as a side dish.  The pancakes we usually have with butter and maple syrup and an egg fried easy-over on top of it.

FM: Well, kind of folk music mostly.  It goes good with cooking for me.  I suppose it might matter on what you're cooking and the occasion, though.  I was working on the melodies for "What do you do with a drunken sailor", some bits from "Si Bheag Si Mhor", and a couple old Seekers tunes on this particular occasion. 

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Basically fun/sweet melodies.  Even with a pan of taters frying and a couple of skillets going at once with pancakes, you can get in a verse and chorus between turning the taters and flipping pancakes, if you're a bit quick.

Fiddlestix: Would that be ethyl rubbing alcohol or isopropyl, and 70% or 90%?  Or would it matter?

NV: My household is vegetarian, so we don't do the ham or bacon, but it would probably be good!  We do eat eggs and dairy (ovo-lacto-vegetarian, rather than vegan), so the idea of something like crepes with asparagus and a white sauce sounds good too. We have asparagus out in the garden at the moment.  Hmmmmmmm. 

NV: Getting proper nutrition with vegan diet is hard, and often more expensive.   Tofu?  Well.. Tofu is a four letter word (US slang for a "bad" word). LOL  I know many ways to cook it, since I used to work as a cook in an oriental restaurant (as well as some western restaurants), but I still can't think of many places where I would rather eat tofu than a good honest bit of cheese or egg. LOL  Still, different people like different things, and there is nothing wrong with it.  It can be good, but I would usually just rather eat something like fresh washed cheese curds instead.  

Fiddletix: Ok, 70% isopropyl.  I had to ask, since I sometimes make perfume/cologne as a hobby and so I have quite a few different sorts of alcohol around at different percentages.  They are all solvents, and some of them can also break down organic matter pretty fast.  Figured I had better ask what you are using to get good results.

I have used alcohol prep pads, but they are often too wet and will drip easily.  Most of the time I just clean the strings by wiping with a dry piece of old silk.  Silk is fairly soft and doesn't lint much.  Steel strings can also be boiled or cleaned in an ultrasonic cleaner and then oiled with some very light lubricant like a nut oil or WD-40 and wiped dry.  It will restore some of the brightness by getting out the finger oils, dust and etc, but since the metal will already have lost a lot of its "liveliness" by the time that would make much difference.  So just replacing strings old enough to benefit from treatments like boiling or ultrasonic cleaning is usually better.  Such cleaning tricks are a lot of bother, considering the strings still won't sound quite as nice as a fresh set and will go to pot quicker.

I use a silk&steel set, so I am a bit leery of using anything but a clean dry bit of cloth to clean the wound strings.  Alcohol may be ok on bow hair for a few minutes, but it is a solvent and there is no way to tell what it might do to the fibers down beneath the wrap of a wound string with a non-steel core, since it won't necessarily evaporate off as quick as it would on a bit of hair that can be air dried.  I've used it on the unwrapped strings, though.