Cleaning the material is the first and essential job of making gut strings. Cleaning is accomplished with a scraper like the one in this picture. This tool came to me from the Armor Company through Glen Bjorkman, and we still use it in the workshop today; it has been scraping the gut for about one hundred years. The scraping surface is a piece of black plastic. This dark background clearly shows the fat particles in the gut that show bright white. These can then be scraped from the gut or sometimes even cut from it. The fat interferes with the bonding of the collagen as the gut dries, so its removal is most important, and this is a crucial step in making good strings.