Gear maintenance

[LPF83]

What do you guys do to maintain your gear?  Aside from keeping good temperature/humidity levels, for the most part (music gear or otherwise) I just try to keep things as dust free as possible.  At one point I was using a regular small electronics cordless vac to get in between knobs, etc. About a year or so ago I got a Black and Decker cordless flex (shown in this guys video below).  I put a dusting brush attachment on it that works great for making the process go quickly... For me, speed and ease of the job is important because it means I'm less likely to put the task off..   Maybe once a week and 1-2 minutes and everything is dust free.  I can actually vac my entire house (because I have wood floors with no rugs) with this thing using the floor attachment the guy in the video below says he has no use for.   Works great on car interior too... I use a different brush for household or car than I do on music gear.  Its the ergonomics of this particular thing that's the magic.  I've heard of folks just dusting off their gear with a paintbrush or other similar things that are only moving the dust to another location to be stirred up again, I find this method works best.

It's a bit humorous to see someone list a Yamaha DX1 on Reverb for $135,000 and they couldn't be bothered to clean the dust off the thing for the photo op.  geez....

[jg666]

I originally used a couple of small makeup brushes (that was embarrassing buying those myself in Home Bargains!) but then got a flexible hose attachment for my dyson cordless and that does a good job.

The Dyson I have is a V11 Absolute and the handheld part of it isn't as light as I'd like it to be for doing these sorts of things, so a good lighter smaller handheld might be better.
 

[Aovi]

More than a couple of decades ago I had a freely-smoking studio.  Each Spring all the gear got opened up (was not a large studio) and cleansed of the nastiness.  Really made me think about what I was doing to my lungs.  All gear made it out of there just fine and most are still in service today.

These days I might open up a synth after a couple years just to inspect connections, clean out any dust, etc.  Other than that just keeping it clean on the outside.