I got a bottle of Dunlop Ultraglide 65 String Cleaner and Conditioner and tried it today on my flattop strings, which happen to be an 80/20 bronze set from the Ernie Ball Earthwood line. The strings are not the most resistant to dirt and corrosion, and they are nowhere near so far gone that they need changing but weren't exactly out-of-the-package new.

The Dunlop 65 appears to be a very lemony oil, and it easily went on the strings with the spongy applicator, after which I wiped off the excess

The strings were cleaner, and a lot smoother. I definitely recommend this stuff. Clean strings aren't the worst thing, and this stuff makes it easy.

Back in the day I used to use rubbing alcohol to clean my strings. That can be drying, to say the least, if you get any on the wood of the neck, and it certainly doesn't make the strings feel smooth. This stuff from Dunlop is a lot better.

A bottle costs somewhere between $5 and $7 -- about the price of a set of strings. It's worth it.

I found this picture of my 1976 Gibson ES-175 in my 2016 photo folder. I now remember taking it to show my new guitar-playing friend Dave Green what the guitar's pickguard looks like so he could compare it to his Japanese-made ES-175 copy.

Here you see much of the guitar's body. What pegs it as a 1970s Gibson archtop electric? It has chrome pickup covers and a chrome tailpiece (as opposed to nickel, which tends to age, albeit gracefully) and "witch hat" volume and tone knobs. The nickel covers -- made famous on the rare and pricey PAF (Patent Applied For) humbuckers -- tend to age, albeit gracefully. I believe Gibson introduced the "witch hat" knobs in the late 1960s. Earlier Gibson electrics came with "top hat" or speed knobs.

You can't see it here, but the neck is made of three pieces of maple (as opposed to a single piece of mahogany on earlier models) and includes the thickened "volute" near the nut, meant to strengthen the neck at the point where many Gibson's suffer from catastrophic breaks.

All three of those things contribute to neck strength: maple instead of mahogany, laminated instead of one piece, volute instead of no volute. The volute was unpopular and eventually discontinued. It doesn't bother me. I kind of like the "feel" of knowing I'm at the end of the neck.

The bridge on this guitar, for this year of production (1976) is a bit of an anomaly. It's a compensated rosewood bridge, the kind that Gibson had been using for decades on its archtop guitars, both acoustic and electric. I call it an anomaly because one of the changes Gibson made on the 1976 ES-175 is switching from the traditional wooden bridge to a metal Tune-O-Matic like you would find on a Les Paul or ES-335.

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I've never been a big fan of Chicago, the band. I've heard this song before and had no idea it was by them. But I really like "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?"