Cleaning Smudges Off of Vinyl Cords

[cihensley@aol.com]

Here is a product that seems to work pretty well: Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. It is a sponge like material you use slightly damp. I wash to cords first, in the dishwasher or clothes washer. Any dark smudges remaining, and there always seems to be some, rub with the Magic Eraser. It is easier if you put the cord on a 3/8" wooden dowel first. It seems to remove smudges faster than other cleaners.

Chuck

[jsowers]

I use denatured alcohol on cords. One pass with denatured alcohol on a paper towel and it's clean as a whistle. It gets off paint, smudges and dirt and the cord looks new most of the time. Sometimes if it's really caked with dirt, first I use Windex, but normally denatured alcohol does the trick by itself. You can find it at your nearest mom and pop hardware store. It's a pretty good solvent.

If you clean a coil cord when it's on a dowel, you won't get to any of the dirt inside the coils. I clean a cord starting in the middle and work my way to the end, getting inside and outside the coils by grasping it with the paper towel with alcohol on it and pulling the cord through. Then I start in the middle and recoil it the way it was, taking out whatever kinks there are. Then I start again from the middle and do the other side and then recoil. That way it's still coiled the way it always was, which seems to work better for the thicker 50s cords.

I do use a dowel if there are stray coils, and then it gets put on the car dashboard in the summer sun for a day or two.

I look at cord cleaning as a form of therapy for me, as is cleaning the rest of the phone. It's a good feeling when I can make it look like new and get off all the years of grime. The cords are usually the part that isn't clean, so cleaning them makes the most difference.

One note of caution: Don't use denatured alcohol on soft plastic phone parts. It's fine on the cords, but not the plastics.

[gpo706]

Some good tips here. better than my method of anti-bacterial wipes and sprays, especially where the gunge gathers at the the grommets.