 If there's one thing that really grinds my gears about computer components, it is their apparent obsession that their creators have with putting glossy plastic on all the places it really should not be. I don't know if how we still have this problem. I'll admit it hasn't really been as bad lately, but it does still happen. Anyways, in a fit of rage after marking up yet another glossy plastic surface, I ran to the store and assembled the tools I thought I may need to transform glossy plastic surface into a beautiful brushed finish. Intel's new 750 series SSDs utilize the NVMe standard, providing speeds never seen before on consumer storage drives. Click now to learn more. So how do we make this transformation from a piece of glossy plastic to a nice brushed finish? I chose to tackle this in the best way I know how, through scientific testing. I assembled the necessary tools, sandpaper in 320, 400, 800, and 1000 grit. I ideally wanted to feature 600 grit as well, but I wasn't able to source any locally. I also grabbed a grade zero and grade three steel wool and three rough 3M stripping pads, the kind you'd use to scrub hard to clean things or remove some type of thing off of a surface. They were labeled as heavy contour surface stripping and final. Most of these were used individually, but the sandpaper will be used in succession starting at 320 grit and ending at 1000. Once I had these tools at my side, I found some surfaces with a glossy finish, namely an original Nintendo Wii, the back of an Asus monitor, and an old Seagate GoFlex satellite. But Luke, you may be saying, why ruin a perfectly good Wii monitor and GoFlex drive for the sake of your silly experiment? Of course, I would not be doing this with my own Wii, and to do this test, the Wii that we're using is actually Linus's. You may have noticed its appearance to be fairly nasty with a bunch of marks and old sticky areas all over it. Only a man with true disregard for his gaming systems would leave them in this state. Plus, he's out of the country right now, so he probably won't mind anyways. Let's see. Hey Linus, do you mind if we use your Wii to test like scratching glossy plastic off things? No answer means no problem. When it comes to the monitor, well we decided to use this monitor because the glossy portion is actually on the back as well, meaning that we could experiment with it and if it came out looking absolutely terrible, I could just use it normally and never have to see my massive failure ever again. And if it worked well, I could transition over to the front of the monitor and change that side over to a brushed plastic finish as well, with the material that I found to leave the most appealing faux brushed plastic finish. And the Seagate drive? Well, I'm sure it was beautiful at one time, but nowadays it is pretty faded, a bit scratched, and covered in fingerprints. This device will be the last one that I use and I'll use my favorite method on it to see what it can accomplish on something like this. So with testing surfaces in place, I taped off sections for each material so that I could compare the efficiency of each in a well-organized fashion. This may result in a weird look once I pull the tape off and will ultimately kind of ruin the aesthetic of these devices, at least at first, but this is a video for you guys and I'm sure Linus won't mind. So here we go. I started with the Wii. I portioned off one side of it for the three levels of 3M pad and the other side for the two varieties of steel wool as well as the sandpaper combination. To my eye, it seems like the zero-grade steel wool provided the best finish on the white surface of the Wii, but it was actually fairly hard to tell as the white brushed plastic doesn't really have the same shine we're accustomed to seeing on black brushed plastic. In the end, they all seemed pretty similar to be completely honest on white brushed plastic, so I think you'd be pretty happy with any of these solutions. My favorite part of this procedure on the Wii was less giving it a brushed look and more just removing the shine and fingerprint potential. The monitor was where we separated the men from the boys, so to speak. The 3M contour stripping pad provided what I think was actually a pretty amazing brushed look finish for a DIY solution like this. If I hadn't been doing this for the test, I may have actually been convinced that it came brushed from the factory without looking all that closely. The runner-up was actually a tie between the grade zero steel wool and the 3M final pad, but it must be noted that it was much more difficult to get a consistent finish with the steel wool as the material was much more malleable in hand and the pads provided a nice solid base to push against and seemed to provide the most even finish overall without the need to do as many touch-ups, which can result in it looking not as nice as more often than not touch-up require the need of even more touch-ups. Since the contour surface stripping pad performed the best on the monitor, I decided to use that for the Seagate drive as well. It actually provided a pretty amazing result to be honest, and I think that the new finish looks pretty darn sharp compared to the old glossy version. I do think it was a little harder than it could have been due to the slowly stripping away the from the white logo, but in the end it was totally worth it. At first I tried covering that logo with tape to protect it, but in the end this just looked kind of weird and it wasn't worth it, so I took it off and made it look the same as the rest. So overall I think this experiment was a success. While it isn't perfect, I was actually able to replicate the look of brush plastic fairly well, especially with these 3M pads. I would definitely recommend giving these a shot if you're planning on running this experiment for yourself, or if you plan on converting some of your glossy plastic to a brush finish on your own. Speaking of improving things, I'm excited to announce a drop on Massdrop today that you will certainly not see very often. They're providing a build your own battle station setup featuring 3 LG 24MC57HQ-P monitors which are 1080p IPS displays and the Ergotek Freedom Arm, a triple monitor stand that has Merica written all over it. Get it? Because uh, freedom or whatever. Anyways, if you want to beef up your display and set up a triple monitor battle station, this is going to be one of the more affordable ways to do so thanks to Massdrop's Group-Buy model. You can check out this drop and many others in the link in the description, draw.psslash-linus-tech-tips. That link doesn't really give us a kickback or anything, but it does let them know that we sent you, which lets them see how awesome the LTT community is and makes the decision to keep supporting the channel a whole lot easier. You think you ever plan on converting glossy plastic to a brush finish or have you done so in the past? Have you tried varnish? Let me know in the comments down below or over on the forum. While you're here, like, dislike, favorite, share, subscribe, follow, comment, go in the comment section down below to get a shirt that isn't from Twitch actually, it'll be from us and we'll probably have some kind of funny stuff on it. Over on the forum you can click on the support us link to do stuff like change your Amazon affiliates, install the Linus Tech Tips notifier so that they can auto change your Amazon affiliate codes for you, become a contributor to the forum because that helps us out a lot and you get a cool little badge thing. Yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to help out. Anyways guys, thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.