Polishing Mouse Feet for Better Glides

Gaming on a hard/hybrid pad like the SkyPad 3.0/MPC450 means you are familiar with changing mouse feet often since the PTFE becomes "scratchy" in a couple of weeks of use. The easiest solution is to stock up on PTFE feet that you can buy in bulk and swap skates when they start to feel less smooth.

The obvious issue with this is that if you do not have fresh skates on hand or do not want to keep ordering new feet every month, you have to find a way to maintain your current set.

Contents

This is not exactly a novel idea, but one day when my mouse skates started sounding like sandpaper on my SkyPad I was curious what would happen if I polished them a bit. The reasoning behind this idea is that PTFE does not become less smooth over time, since it retains the same gliding properties.

The real issue is that the outer layer of the mouse feet becomes scratched up after prolonged use, and tiny pieces of dirt and debris get lodged in the soft PTFE surface resulting in the scratchy sound of the skates. This means that if you can remove this outer crust that has been exposed to these factors you should get to experience a smooth glide of virgin PTFE once again.

After a couple of tests on different types and sizes of mouse skates the conclusion was quite simple for me – this is quite a good idea and skates that I would otherwise throw out have become usable for at least twice the period of time.

To make this work all you need to do is purchase high-grit sandpaper (1000+) and polish the existing surface of your mouse skates to remove the scuffs and debris stuck in them. Ideally, you would remove the skates from the mouse, but since we all got better things to do you can just polish them while still attached to the mouse.

Give each skate a couple of swipes until the surface becomes glossy once again like when you just got the skates. You do not want to go too hard at the feet since you are technically removing the surface from them, shortening the lifespan of these skates.

Using lower grit sandpaper is also not recommended since then you will just scuff the surface even more resulting in the opposite effect of what you are trying to do (for experimental purposes I have tried this as well).

If you use a hard mousepad surface or a hybrid pad that eats mouse skates super fast you can prolong the lifespan of your skates by polishing them with high grit sandpaper. A couple of swipes until they become glossy again and you are back in business.

About The Author

Custom Windows ISO enjoyer, FPS optimizer, and aim improvement enthusiast. Will disassemble all of his peripherals (and sometimes PC parts) to mod them even if all of them work perfectly fine. Follow him on Twitch.

Tuning your webcam for the perfect look with color settings and overlays is quite fun until you realize most of these settings do not get picked up if you use different software. Moreover, a lot of the apps we use to communicate do not even support any sort of tuning for your webcam. Since I […]

The current generation of wireless mice is simply incredible in terms of performance with 4000 Hz polling rate and amazing sensor accuracy. At the same time, the biggest issue that has popped up so far is that because of the increased polling rate and the need to keep the mice lightweight, battery life has dropped […]

Overclocking your parts has become a natural step in setting up your PC for maximum performance, and although it is not necessary since a lot of the new parts are already almost maxed out from the factory, my philosophy is that if I paid for the entire GPU I will use all of it. GPU […]

A very good habit of anyone that is browsing the web is to check every single file they download onto their machine to make sure it does not contain any malicious code. Malware infections are extremely common and the consequences can vary from high CPU usage to your data being stolen. Getting rid of infected […]

Once you got your recording/clipping settings tuned and you have trimmed your clip to the perfect size, you just need to find a way to share it with your friends quickly without losing video quality. There are different approaches to the sharing methods but here are some of the most effective ways I have found […]

If you like recording footage of your gameplay, you have probably realized that the best clips are the ones that get straight into the action and are cropped perfectly to emphasize the action or the special moment you have captured. Dealing with clips that are a bit too long (or with hours of footage) becomes […]