At the risk of creating a duplicate entry (though I searched around and haven't found anything yet), I'm wanting to take the gloss off my Das.
Maybe I should have put a question mark in the title, as I really haven't figured out the best way to go about this yet. I'm sick to death of the smudges and all the fine scratches on my Das. I love the board otherwise and don't want to get rid of it, but surely there's some way to make this case a bit less glossy or even flat without resorting to spray paint.
Any suggestions are appreciated.
EDIT: Here are some pictures of the final product.
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These are HORRIBLE pictures. This camera (cheapy Fuji) has a hard time with shadows. The effect is very uniform and, while still a BIT reflective, it's certainly not glossy. Maybe more of a satin than a matte finish. I'm pretty happy with it, either way. Sorry it took so long to get the pictures up.
My procedure: The first step is to pull the case apart as illustrated
here.
I seem to have gotten a BIT overzealous on the 3rd pass as most of the logo is now gone. For some reason this doesn't bother me NEARLY as much as the gloss did.
Get a piece of 600 grit wet/dry sand paper. Go use it for something else until it's almost completely used up. Seriously... 600 grit is too rough but I don't have a good woodworking shop close to hand, so I made do. At any rate, once it feels like shark skin wet it thoroughly and start rubbing. I did the initial de-glossing with a circular motion then went back over the whole works with straight-line sanding. This gave it a bit of a brushed metal look, of which I approve. Dry the whole works and look it over closely. I ended up going over the whole top with a soft paper towel, pressing very hard to get rid of the milky look the plastic achieved after sanding and drying. This plastic is so soft that even a paper towel can scratch the surface. I may take this back home and pull it apart again to spray it with a coat of matte lacquer, just to protect the finish. That's it... it's pretty straightforward and you can probably skip some of these steps if you go up to a higher grit sanding paper. I may try 0000 steel wool on an edge to see how that turns out. If I do it, I'll update this.